The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  “We got what you might refer to as ‘the party line.’ Warraner gave us a certain amount of information, and we were also permitted to study the church and its environs, but we really found out very little about Prosperous and the Family of Love that we didn’t already know. Furthermore, Warraner’s academic limitations were exposed at a very early stage. He struggled to scrape together credits and D grades. Eventually, we were forced to let him go.

  “Pastor Warraner, as he subsequently began to style himself, was later readmitted to this college as a ‘special student.’ Special students are people from the local community who, for whatever reason, desire to resume their education on a part-time basis. While they’re assessed on their academic record, non-academic achievements are also considered. They pay course fees, and no financial aid is available to them. Their work is graded, and they receive a college transcript, but they are non-degree candidates, and therefore cannot graduate. Pastor Warraner took ten such courses over a period of about five years, some more successfully and enthusiastically than others. He was surprisingly open to issues of Christianity and gender, less so to Asian religions, Islam, and Judaism. Overall, my impression was that Warraner desired the imprimatur of a college education. He wanted to say that he had been to college, and that was all.”

  “I believe he also told me that he’d majored in religion at Bowdoin, and studied as a Master of Divinity at Bangor Theological Seminary.”

  “I suppose, if one were being generous-spirited enough, those statements might offer a certain latitude of interpretation, the latter more than the former. If you asked around, I bet you’d find that he approached Bangor at some point and was rebuffed, or tried to sit in unofficially on seminars. It would fit with that desire for affirmation and recognition.”

  “Any other impression he may have left on you?”

  “He was a fanatic.”

  “Doesn’t that come with the territory?”

  “Sometimes. Warraner, though, could rarely string together more than a couple of sentences without referring to ‘his’ god.”

  “And what kind of god does he worship? I’ve met him, and I’ve seen his church, and I’m still not sure just what kind of pastor he is.”

  “Superficially, Warraner is a variety of austere Protestant. There’s a bit of the Baptist in him, a sprinkling of Methodism, a dash of Quaker, but also a healthy dose of pantheism. None of it is particularly deep, though. His religion, for want of a better explanation, is his church—the bricks and mortar of it. He worships a building, or what that building represents for him. You say that you’ve seen it?”

  “I got the grand tour.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “It’s a little light on crosses for my tastes.”

  “Catholic?”

  “Occasional.”

  “I was raised in the Church of England—Low, I should add—and even I found Warraner’s chapel positively spartan.”

  “The carvings apart.”

  “Yes, they are interesting, aren’t they? Unusual here in the United States. Less so, perhaps, among the older churches of England and certain parts of Europe, although Warraner’s are quite distinctive. It’s a Familist church, of that there can be little doubt, but a Familist chuch of a particular type. This is not the element of the sect that fed into the Quakers or the Unitarians, infused with a spirit of peace and gentleness. It’s something harsher.”

  “And Warraner—is he still a Familist?”

  Williamson finished his coffee. He seemed to be considering making more, then thought better of it. He put his cup down.

  “Yes, Mr. Parker,” he said. “I believe that not only is Warraner a Familist but that Prosperous remains a Familist community. To what end, I couldn’t say.”

  “And their god?”

  “Look again at those carvings inside the church, if you get the chance. My suspicion is that, somewhere along the line, the link between God—the Christian deity—and the rule of nature has become lost to Warraner and those who share his religious convictions. All that’s left is the carvings. For the people of Prosperous, those are the faces of their god.”

  I stood to leave. As I did so, Williamson handed me the books from his desk.

  “I thought these might interest you,” he said. “Just pop them in the post when you’re done with them.”

  There he was again, “pop”-ing, and putting things in the “post.” He caught me smiling.

  “Did I say something funny?”

  “I was just wondering how many dates you’d gotten in the United States because of that accent of yours.”

  He grinned. “It did seem to make me very popular for a while. I suspect I may even have married out of my league because of it.”

  “It’s the residual colonial admiration for the oppressor.”

  “Spoken like a history major.”

  “No, not me, but Warraner said something similar when I met him. He drew an analogy between detection and historical research.”

  “But aren’t all investigations historical?” said Williamson. “The crime is committed in the past, and the investigation conducted in the present. It’s a form of excavation.”

  “Do you feel a paper coming on?”

  “You know, I might do, at that.”

  I flicked through the first of the books. It was heavily illustrated with images and drawings.

  “Pictures too,” I said.

  “If you color any of them in, we may be forced to have a long talk.”

  “One last question?” I said.

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Why are so many of these faces threatening, or hostile?”

  “Fear,” said Williamson. “Fear of the power of nature, fear of old gods. And perhaps, too, the early Church found in such depictions a literal representation of a metaphorical concept—the radix malorum, the ‘root of all evil.’ Hell, if you choose to believe in it, is beneath our feet, not above our heads. You’d have to dig deep to find it, but it wasn’t difficult for Christians with ancient links to the land to conceive of the influence of the maleficent in terms of twisted roots and clinging ivy, of faces formed by something buried far beneath the earth trying to create a physical representation of itself from whatever materials were at hand. But the god depicted on the walls of the Prosperous chapel has no connection with Christianity. It’s older, and beyond conceptions of good and evil. It simply is.”

  “You sound almost as though you believe in it yourself.”

  “Perhaps I just sometimes find it easier to understand how someone could conceive and worship a god of tree and leaf, a god that formed as the land around it formed, than a bearded figure living on a cloud in the sky.”

  “Does that count as a crisis of faith?”

  He grinned again. “No, only a natural consequence of the study of every shade of religious belief, and of trying to teach the importance of being tolerant in a world in which tolerance is associated with weakness or heresy.”

  “Let me guess—you and Michael Warraner didn’t exactly see eye to eye on that subject.”

  “No. He wasn’t hostile toward other forms of religious belief, merely uninterested.”

  “When I see him again, should I pass on your good wishes?” I said.

  “I’d prefer if you didn’t,” said Williamson.

  “Frightened?”

  “Wary. You should be too.” He was no longer distracted, no longer smiling. “One of the challenges I like to set my students for their first class is a word association game. I ask them to list all the words, positive or negative, that come to mind when they think of ‘god.’ Sometimes I get pages of words, at other times a handful, but Warraner was the only student who ever wrote just one solitary word. That word was “hunger.” He and those like him worship a hungry god, Mr. Parker, and no good can ever come of worshipping a dei
ty that hungers. No good at all.”

  CHAPTER

  XXXVII

  I drove back toward Scarborough, but stopped off at Bull Moose Music’s massive warehouse store on Payne Road and browsed the racks for an hour. It was part pleasure, part displacement activity. I felt that I’d reached a dead end as far as Prosperous was concerned, and my talk with Williamson had served only to confirm my own suspicions about the town without opening any new avenues of inquiry.

  I was no closer to finding Annie Broyer than I had been when I started out, and I was beginning to wonder if I might not have been mistaken in assuming that everything I had learned in the past week was useful or even true: an elderly couple, a blue car, a passing reference to a job in Prosperous made to a woman with the mental capacity of a child, and a homeless man’s obsession with the carvings on an ancient church. Every piece of information I had gathered was open to question, and it was entirely possible that Annie Broyer would turn up in Boston, or Chicago, or Seattle in the days and weeks to come. Even Lucas Morland’s passing reference to Annie as an “ex-junkie” could be explained away if he had made a simple phone call to Portland or Bangor after my first visit to the town. In the eyes of some, I had already violated the primary commandment of an investigation: don’t assume. Don’t create patterns where there are none. Don’t conceive of a narrative and then force the evidence to fit it. On the other hand, all investigations involve a degree of speculation—the capacity to bear witness to a crime and imagine a chain of events that might have caused that crime to be committed. An investigation was not simply a matter of historical research, as Warraner had suggested. It was an act of faith both in one’s own capacities and in the possibility of justice in a world that had made justice subservient to the rule of law.

  But I had no crime to investigate. I had only a homeless man with a history of depression who might well have hanged himself in a fit of desperation, and a missing girl with a history of narcotic and alcohol abuse who had drifted for most of her life. Was I fixating on Prosperous because its citizens were wealthy and privileged, while Jude and his daughter were poor and suffering? Was I marking Warraner and Morland for simply doing what a pastor and a policeman should do, which was to protect their people?

  And yet . . .

  Michael Warraner wasn’t quite a fraud, but something potentially much more dangerous: a frustrated man with a set of religious or spiritual principles that reinforced his inflated opinion of himself and his place in the world. It was also clear from the way Morland reacted to my unauthorized visit to the church that Warraner had a position of authority in the town, which meant that there were influential individuals who either shared his beliefs or didn’t entirely discount them.

  What—if anything—all that had to do with the disappearance of Annie and the death of her father, I did not know. Prosperous just felt wrong to me, and I’d grown to trust my feelings. Then again, Angel and Louis might have asked if I ever felt right about anything, and if I’d learned to trust those feelings too. I could have countered by ­replying that nobody ever asked for my help when there wasn’t a problem, but I then found myself growing annoyed that I was having arguments—and, more to the point, losing them—with Angel and Louis even when they weren’t actually present.

  I headed into Portland, where I caught a movie at the Nickelodeon and then ate a burger at the Little Tap House on High Street. The building had once housed Katahdin before that restaurant’s move to Forest Avenue. A tapas place had briefly occupied the location in the aftermath of the move, and now the Little Tap House had carved out a niche for itself as a neighborhood bar with good food. I drank a soda and tried to read a little of the books with which Williamson had entrusted me. They traced the development of foliate sculpture from at least the first century AD, through its adoption by the early Church, and on to its proliferation throughout Western Europe. Some of the illustrations were more graphic than others. My server seemed particularly dismayed by a capital in the cathedral at Autun that depicted a man disappearing into the jaws of a leafed face. Many of the carvings, such as a thirteenth-century mask from Bamberg Cathedral, in Germany, had a kind of beauty to them, which rendered them even more sinister.

  I did find a source for Williamson’s Latin reference: the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus, in which Satan was described as radix omnium malorum, “the root of all evil,” alongside a picture of a tricephalos, a three-faced demon from the façade of San Pietro, in Tuscany. Coiling tendrils pushed through the mouths of the demons, extrusions from the original root, and the text described them as “blood-suckers” in the context of another fifteenth-century head from Melrose Abbey. Here too there was a reference to the relationship between the human and plant elements in the masks as essentially hostile or parasitic, although the general consensus seemed to be that they represented a type of symbiosis, a long-term interaction and mutually beneficial relationship between two species. Man received the blessings of nature’s fruits, or the rebirth wrought by the changing of the seasons, and in return—

  Well, that last part wasn’t so clear, although the cathedral at Autun, with its images of consumption, offered one possible realm of speculation.

  I closed the books, paid my tab, and left the bar. The weather had warmed up a little since the previous night—not by much, but the weathermen were already predicting that the worst of winter was now behind us for another year; prematurely, I suspected. The sky was clear as I drove home, and the saltwater marshes smelled fresh and clean as I parked outside my house. I walked around to the back door to enter by the kitchen. It had become a habit with me ever since Rachel and Sam moved out. Entering by the front door and seeing the empty hallway was somehow more depressing than going in through the kitchen, which was where I spent most of my time anyway. I opened the door and had reached out to key in the alarm code when my dead daughter spoke to me from behind. She said just one word

  daddy

  and it contained within it the prospect of living and the hope of dying, of endings and beginnings, of love and loss and peace and rage, all wrapped up in two whispered syllables.

  I was already diving to the floor when the first of the shotgun blasts hit me, the pellets tearing the skin from my back, the hair from my skull, the flesh from my bones. I burned. I fell to the kitchen floor, and found the strength to kick at the door, knocking it closed, but the second blast blew away the lock and most of the glass, showering me with slivers and splinters. The floor was slick with my blood as I tried to rise, my feet sliding in the redness. I somehow stumbled into the hallway, and now pistol shots were sounding from behind me. I felt the force of their impact in my back, and my shoulder, and my side. I went down again, but as the pain took hold I found it in myself to twist my body to the left. I screamed as I landed on the floor, but I was now halfway across the doorway of my office. My right hand found the corner of the wall, and I dragged myself inside. Again I kicked a door closed, and managed to seat myself upright against my desk. I drew my gun. I raised it and fired a round. I didn’t know what it hit. I didn’t care. It was enough that it was in my hand.

  “Come on,” I cried, and blood and spittle sprayed from my lips. “Come on!” I said, louder now, and I did not know if I was speaking to myself or to whatever or whomever lay beyond the door.

  “Come on,” I said a third time, to the approaching darkness, to the figures that beckoned from within it, to the peace that comes at last to every dead thing. Above it all sounded the wailing of the alarm.

  I fired again, and two bullets tore through the door in response. One missed. The other did not.

  “Come—”

  THE WOLF LOOKED UP at the men who surrounded him. He had tried to gnaw his trapped paw off, but had not succeeded. Now he was weary. The time had come. He snarled at the hunters, the fur around his mouth wet with his own blood. A sharp, bitter scent troubled his senses, the smell of noise and dying.

  He howled, the final s
ound that he would ever make. In it was both defiance and a kind of resignation. He was calling on death to come for him.

  The gun fired, and the wolf was gone.

  “HOLD HIM! HOLD HIM!”

  Light. No light.

  “Jesus, I can’t even get a grip on him, there’s so much blood. Okay, on three. One, two—”

  “Ah, for Christ’s sake.”

  “His back is just meat. What the fuck happened here?”

  Light. No light. Light.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Yes. No. I saw the paramedic. I saw Sharon Macy behind him. I tried to speak, but no words would come.

  “Mr. Parker, can you hear me?”

  Light. Stronger now. “You stay with me, you hear? You stay!”

  Up. Movement. Ceiling. Lights.

  Stars.

  Darkness.

  Gone.

  CHAPTER

  XXVIII

  The house, larger than most of its neighbors, lay on a nondescript road midway between Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach on the Delaware coast. Most of the surrounding homes were vacation rentals or summer places used by Washingtonians with a little money to spend. Transience was the norm here. True, a handful of year-round residents lived on the road, but they tended to mind their own business and left others to mind theirs.

  A significant number of the homes in the area were owned by gay couples, for Rehoboth had long been one of the East Coast’s most gay-friendly resorts. This was perhaps surprising, given that Rehoboth was founded in 1873 by the Reverend Robert W. Todd as a Methodist meeting camp. Reverend Todd’s vision of a religious community was short-lived, though, and by the 1940s the gay Hollywood crowd were carousing at the DuPont property along the ocean. Then came the Pink Pony Bar in the 1950s, and the Pleasant Inn and the Nomad Village in the 1960s, all known to be welcoming to DC’s more closeted citizens. In the 1990s, some of the town’s less tolerant residents made a vain attempt to restore what were loosely termed “family values,” in some cases by beating the shit out of anyone who even looked gay. But negotiations among representatives of the gay community, homeowners, and the police largely put an end to the unrest, and Rehoboth settled gently into its role as not only the “Nation’s Summer Capital” but the “Nation’s Gay Summer Capital.”