The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  “Hi, Marie? This is Valerie Gillson. Yes, I’m fine, but I’m about a mile south of town and there’s a wounded deer in the middle of the road. It’s in a lot of pain, and I don’t—”

  She stopped talking. She had just noticed that there was something tangled around the back legs of the deer. It looked like wire. No, not wire: roots, or thick briars—she wasn’t sure which. They extended into the undergrowth. It was almost as if the wounded deer had been placed there as bait. Instinctively, she raised her phone and took a photograph of the deer’s legs.

  She heard Marie’s voice asking if she was okay.

  “Sorry, Marie, I just noticed—”

  Valerie Gillson never got to tell Marie what she had just seen, because at that moment a logging-company truck took the bend behind her just a fraction too fast. The driver swerved to avoid the car and struck Valerie instead, killing her instantly. Her cell phone was recovered in the aftermath. On it was the last photograph that Valerie had taken: the hindquarters of a fawn, its legs entwined with dark roots.

  But of the animal itself there was no sign.

  And in the gunsmithery at the back of his store Ben Pearson was carrying his favorite hunting rifle to the workbench. The gun was the same one that he had used to kill Annie Broyer. Chief Morland had advised him to get rid of it, and Ben knew that it made sense to do as Morland said. The bullet had gone straight through the girl, and Ben hadn’t been able to find any trace of it, try as he might. The rifle linked him to murder, and it didn’t matter how much time and effort he’d put into customizing it so that there wasn’t a gun to rival it for miles; it had to be taken apart and destroyed.

  He had been thinking a lot about the dead girl. He didn’t regret what he’d done. If she’d escaped, that would have been the end for all of them, but he had a lingering sense of transgression. The girl hadn’t been his to kill. She had been sourced for a particular reason. She was the town’s girl. She belonged to Prosperous, and her life was the town’s to take. By killing her, he had deprived the town of its due. That had never happened before, not in the long history of the community. Ben feared that if another girl wasn’t found soon there could be repercussions. He would bury the rifle in the woods. It would represent his own small sacrifice, an act of recompense.

  For the first, and last, time, Ben stumbled in his workshop, a place that he had known for decades. As he fell, his finger slipped inside the trigger guard. The rifle should not have been loaded. As far as Ben was concerned, the rifle could not have been loaded. He was obsessively careful about such matters, and never left a round chambered.

  The bullet tore through his chest, nicking his heart.

  And he held his beloved rifle in his arms as he died.

  CHAPTER

  XXIX

  I had been anticipating the call from Euclid Danes ever since the first reports began to link the deaths of the soldiers in Afghanistan to the town of Prosperous. A traffic fatality and an apparently accidental shooting in the same town in the space of twenty-four hours would have been unlikely to attract quite the same degree of media interest, but the addition of the military casualties, and the manner in which the soliders had died, brought attention to Prosperous, and not just from the local and state outlets. The nationals turned their gaze on the town, and it was featured on the Web sites of the New York Times and USA Today. The task of dealing with the media fell to Hayley Conyer, as the head of the board of selectmen. (One unfortunate local TV reporter inadvertently referred to it as the board of “selectpersons” within earshot of Conyer, and was lucky to escape with his life.) She handled her role well. She was polite, dignified, and distant. She gave the reporters just enough to keep them from prying further, but in repeating the same sound bites over and over, along with ongoing pleas for privacy, she managed to dull their curiosity. Prosperous weathered the storm of attention for a few days, and then subsided into a traumatized calm.

  Euclid Danes called me on the third day, when Prosperous was already starting to slide from prominence in the bulletins.

  “Looks like Prosperous has emptied its barrel of good fortune,” he said. He didn’t sound triumphant, but concerned.

  “It happens,” I said.

  “Not to Prosperous.”

  “I guess they’ll just have to deal with it.”

  “That’s what worries me. I received a call early this morning. There was no caller ID. The voice was male, but I didn’t recognize it. He told me that my bullshit wasn’t going to be tolerated any longer, and if I didn’t keep my mouth shut I’d be put in a hole in the ground, and my bitch sister too. His words, not mine. I like my sister, apart from her cooking. I was also warned not to go shooting my mouth off to strangers in Benny’s.”

  “Somebody ratted you out.”

  “Money’s scarce in Dearden, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was being paid a little on the side to keep an eye on me, but I thought you should know about the call. With all that’s happened over the last day or two, Prosperous is going to be in pain, and wounded animals lash out.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. Thank you, Mr. Danes.”

  Euclid Danes said goodbye and hung up.

  I waited until the remains of the soldiers were repatriated, and the bodies laid in the ground, before I returned to Prosperous.

  IT WAS PASTOR WARRANER’S daughter who alerted him to the presence of a man in the cemetery.

  Warraner had almost finished the final detailing on the last of the kitchen cabinets. It was an out-of-town order from a banker and his wife in Rockland, and they hadn’t even blinked at his estimate, even though he’d added a premium of twenty percent to what was already an expensive quote. The recent tragedies, and their implications for the town, would not force him to miss his deadline. He was already a week ahead when the deaths occurred, for which he was grateful; he could not work well with fear in his heart, and his pace had slowed during Prosperous’s recent troubles.

  The board was scheduled to meet the following evening, now that the media circus had collapsed its tents and departed to seek out new miseries and misfortunes. Warraner had pressed for an earlier conclave, but Hayley Conyer had resisted. The presence of the newspapers and TV cameras, and the unwelcome attention they brought on Prosperous, had disturbed her, adding to her shock and grief at the four deaths. She and Ben Pearson had been close, even though their personalities had differed vastly. There was an element of the Brahmin to Hayley, while Ben had been an earthy Mainer through and through. Unlike so many others in Prosperous, Ben Pearson had no fear of Hayley Conyer, and she had admired his independence of thought. It made her respect his opinion more than those of the other board members, and she usually tended to listen when he disagreed with her, and adapt her views and actions accordingly.

  Now there was a vacancy on the board. Under ordinary circumstances, the remaining members would have come up with the names of suitable candidates and presented them to the townsfolk for ­rubber-stamping, but Prosperous was in crisis and this was not the time for an election. The board would continue with only five members, and Morland and Warraner would remain as observers who could offer advice and arguments but were still not entitled to vote.

  The soldiers, along with Valerie Gillson and Ben Pearson, were buried in the new cemetery to the south. Nobody had been interred in the grounds of the old church since the end of the last century, not even deceased members of the senior families, whose surnames already adorned so many stones in the churchyard. It was Warraner’s father who had decreed that the cemetery was now closed to interments, and nobody had questioned his decision. The only reason he had given was this:

  Why risk disturbing what is at rest?

  In recent days his son had issued an even more restrictive edict. The cemetery and church were out of bounds to all. Nobody was to trespass there, and while the media was in town Morland and his deputies—aided by the most trustworthy of the youn
ger citizens—had maintained a twenty-four-hour vigil to ensure that visitors and reporters were kept away. Had Warraner been asked for a reason, he would have given this one:

  Why risk disturbing further what is no longer at rest?

  Now here was his youngest daughter telling him that a man was walking among the stones, and taking photographs of the church with his phone. Warraner was so incensed that he didn’t even go to the house to get a coat but ran in his shirtsleeves through the woods, ignoring the cold, ignoring, too, the branches that pulled at him even as he recalled the final photograph on Valerie Gillson’s cell phone, the image of a deer with its legs bound by briars, a deer that had been crippled and laid out as bait. . . .

  He burst from the woods and saw the intruder.

  “Hey!” he cried. “That’s private property, and sacred ground. You’ve no right to be in there.”

  The stranger turned, and at the sight of him Pastor Warraner immediately understood that the town’s troubles had just increased considerably.

  I WATCHED WARRANER AS he came to a halt at the iron railing that surrounded the cemetery. He was breathing heavily, and a scratch on his neck was bleeding into his shirt collar.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  I walked toward him. He watched my progress carefully.

  “Same as last time,” I said. “Trying to find a missing girl.”

  “She’s not in this place, and you’re disturbing the peace of the dead.”

  I sidestepped a tilting stone cross. The names and dates on it were so old and faded as to be entirely illegible.

  “Really? I’ve found that it takes a lot to wake the dead, unless some were never quite asleep to begin with.”

  “This is neither the time nor the place for mockery, Mr. Parker. Our town has been through a difficult period.”

  “I’m aware of that, Mr. Warraner,” I said. “And I’m entirely serious.”

  I was facing him now. His hands gripped the railing so tightly that his knuckles showed white against his skin. I turned to the right and continued walking, forcing him to keep pace with me.

  “The gate is to your left,” he said.

  “I know. That’s how I got in.”

  “It’s locked.”

  “It was locked. I found it open.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I suppose you could call Chief Morland and ask him to dust it for fingerprints. Or you could just buy a better lock.”

  “I fully intend to call Chief Morland,” said Warraner. “I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”

  His hands searched his pockets for his cell phone but came up empty. I offered him mine.

  “Feel free to call, but I was planning to pay him another visit anyway, just as soon as I’ve finished here.”

  I saw that Warraner was tempted to take my phone, but even he could appreciate the absurdity of doing so. The threat of police involvement was of limited effectiveness if the person being threatened was only a middleman away from calling the cops on himself.

  “What do you want, Mr. Parker?” he said.

  I paused beside a hole in the ground. It was similar to the one that Euclid Danes had pointed out to me close to the edge of his own land.

  “I was wondering what this might be?”

  I had stumbled across the hole by accident—literally; I had almost broken my ankle in it.

  “It’s a fox den,” he said.

  “Really?”

  I knelt and examined it. An active den usually retained signs of the animal’s comings and goings, but this had none. The ground around it was undisturbed.

  “It’s big for a fox hole,” I said. “And I don’t see any sign of foxes.”

  “It’s an old den,” said Warraner. Hostility flowed from him in waves.

  “Do you have many old dens around here?”

  “Possibly. I’ve never taken the time to count them. For the last time, I want you to leave this place. Now!”

  If we’d both been nine years old and in a schoolyard I could have asked him to make me, or inquired about what he might do if I refused, but that didn’t seem appropriate in a cemetery, and I’d annoyed him enough for now. He tracked me back to the gate and examined the lock once I was back on the right side of the fence. I hadn’t been forced to break the lock; two decades of friendship with Angel had taught me the rudiments of picking. Warraner wrapped the chain from gate to fence and secured it.

  “Do you want to follow me to the police department?” I said.

  “No,” said Warraner. “I know you’ll go there. You have more questions to ask, don’t you? Why can’t you just leave us in peace?”

  “Questions always remain, even when things work out. It comes with the territory.”

  “With being a self-righteous prick who can’t allow a town to mourn its dead undisturbed?”

  He savored the word “prick.” I’d been called worse, but not by anyone with a degree in divinity.

  “No, with being human. You should try it, Mr. Warraner, or Pastor Warraner, or whatever title you’ve chosen to give yourself. Your dead are past caring, and your mourning will do them no good. I’m searching for a missing girl. If she’s alive, she’s in trouble. If she’s dead, someone else is. As an individual who professes to be a man of god, I’d suggest that your compassion is currently misdirected.”

  Warraner plunged his hands into the pockets of his jeans as though he feared the damage he might otherwise inflict on me. He was a big man, and strong as well. If he got his hands on me, he’d do some harm. Of course, I’d shatter one of his knees before he got that close, but it wouldn’t look good on my résumé. Still, all of his weight was on his left leg, which was ramrod straight. If he moved, I’d take him.

  Warraner breathed deeply to calm himself and recover his dignity. The moment passed.

  “You know nothing of my god, Mr. Parker,” he said solemnly.

  I looked past him and took in the ancient stones of his church, and the leering faces visible in the fading afternoon light.

  “You may be wrong about that, Pastor.”

  He stayed at the gate as I drove away, his hands deep in his pockets, his gaze fixed on me, standing in the shadow of his church.

  In the shadow of his god.

  CHAPTER

  XXX

  Chief Morland was looking out the window of his office as I pulled up outside his department. If he was pleased to see me, he was trying manfully to hide it. His arms were folded, and he stared at me without expression as I walked up the path. Inside there was a strained silence among the staff, and I guessed that, not long before, Chief Morland had been shouting into a telephone receiver at Pastor Warraner. Nobody offered me coffee and a cookie. Nobody even wanted to catch my eye.

  Morland’s door was open. I stood on the threshold.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  He unfolded his arms. “Would it matter if I did?”

  “I can talk to you from here, but it seems kind of childish.”

  Morland gestured me inside and told me to close the door. He waited for me to sit before doing the same himself.

  “You’ve been keeping my phone busy,” he said.

  “Warraner?”

  “The pastor was just the most recent caller. We’ve had reports of a man in a car like yours casing properties, and I already sent a deputy out to take a look. If you’d been driving your fancy Mustang I’d have known it was you, but you seem to have left your toy automobile back in Portland today.”

  “I was trying to be discreet.”

  “The pastor didn’t think so. Maybe you failed to notice the sign that read PRIVATE PROPERTY out by the cemetery?”

  “If I paid attention to every sign that read PRIVATE PROPERTY or NO ENTRY, I’d never get anything done. Besides, I figured that after the last tour I was pr
actically a member of the congregation.”

  “It doesn’t have a congregation.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask about that. I still find it strange that a religious sect would go to the trouble of hauling a church across the Atlantic, rebuild it brick by brick, and then just shrug and walk off.”

  “They died out.”

  “You’re speaking metaphorically, right? Because the descendants of the original settlers are still here. This town has more old names than the Bible.”

  “I’m no historian, but there are plenty of folk in this town who consider themselves one,” said Morland. “The Familists faded away. I’ve heard it said that the worst thing to happen to the Family of Love was leaving England. They survived because they were hunted and oppressed, and there’s nothing more guaranteed to harden a man’s convictions than to be told that he can’t follow his own beliefs. With freedom to worship also came the freedom not to worship.”

  “And where do you worship, Chief?”

  “I’m a Catholic. I go to Mary Immaculate down in Dearden.”

  “Are you familiar with a man there called Euclid Danes?”

  “Euclid’s a Methodist, although they’d disown him if they weren’t so short on bodies to fill their seats. How do you know him?”

  He didn’t blink, didn’t look away, didn’t rub his left ear with his right hand or scratch his nose or whatever it is that men and women are supposed to do when they’re lying or trying to hide knowledge, but he might just as well have. Morland was well aware that I’d been speaking with Euclid Danes. He wouldn’t have been much of a chief of police if he weren’t, not in a town like Prosperous. So he pretended, and I let him pretend, and each of us watched the other act.

  “I found him on the Internet,” I said.

  “Looking for a date?”

  “He’s a little old for me, although I bet he cleans up nicely.”

  “Euclid’s not very popular in this town.”

  “He wears it as a badge of pride. In his place, I might do the same. Are you aware that he’s been threatened?”