by Joe Flanagan
Warren was sitting at home, reading the story in the Boston Globe when he got a call from Grayson and James at Antiquitus about the work they had discussed before all the trouble started. With ceremony and a hint of intrigue, James revealed their plans to convert the barn into a bed-and-breakfast. Their well-heeled clientele, taken with the property and its quaint environs, often asked about places to stay, where to eat, and what to visit. The converted barn would be a natural draw, rustic, intentionally suspended at the edge of dilapidation but chic and comfortable. Their proposal was for Warren to manage the renovation. He and Mike could live there while the work was going on. When it was finished, they wanted him to stay on as caretaker for the property in general.
One morning in mid-October, Warren walked up the steps to the rectory at St. Clement’s. Mrs. Gonsalves answered his knock. There was a visible reaction in her face when she recognized him. “Is Father Keenan here?” he asked.
She held the door open for him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your son.”
Warren nodded.
“He is O.K.?”
“Yes, thank you. He’s fine.”
“I will get Father.”
In a few minutes, Father Keenan appeared. They went into what looked like a seldom-used parlor that appeared to have been furnished and decorated in another century. Father Keenan said, “It’s a good thing Mr. Wiggins is not here.”
“Mr. Wiggins?”
“The attorney from the archdiocese. We’re not speaking to anyone, officially. But he’s out running errands. I must speak with you. I owe it to you. Before you say anything, let me tell you how sorry I am for what you and your son have gone through. If you believe I am at fault in any way, please tell me, and tell me how I can make it right because I never intended for this to happen. I will make amends to you in any way I can. And please understand that I am truly sorry for what Father Boyle did.”
Warren sat back in his chair. He had not expected this kind of candor or humility. “I’m not sure why I’m here, to be absolutely honest with you.”
“It’s understandable. You want answers. You are no longer with the police force, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“You know they’re after Father Boyle. I can’t see him harming children—murdering them—but that’s what they’re saying.”
“His activities have been very suspicious.”
“Indeed they have.”
“They say my son was unharmed. He wasn’t molested in any way.”
Father Keenan closed his eyes. “Thank God. Thank God.”
“Did you have doubts?”
“There has been such a confluence of strange events. And they’re saying all kinds of things. I don’t know what will come out next. No, I don’t believe Terry would ever have touched your son. He was completely incapable of such things, the man I knew.”
“Why do you suppose he took my son?”
“I’m sure he had some reason that made sense to him at the time, however wrong it was. He was mentally ill. He was an alcoholic as well. He once told me that people didn’t know what to make of him, but I did. He had a hole in him that he couldn’t fill. I think taking your son out to Wellfleet had something to do with that condition.
“There was a boy in Belmont. A very sick boy, terminally ill with cancer. Father Boyle had found a place that seemed . . . I don’t know. Miraculous. To him, anyway. It was during one of his unwell periods. He took that boy out there—with no one’s permission, with no explanation—and it was an awful scandal. The Church managed to avoid legal action, but shortly afterward, Father Boyle attempted suicide. He nearly succeeded. He went into the sanctuary at Our Lady of Good Counsel, knelt there, and shot himself in the chest. The bullet narrowly missed his aorta. There was nerve damage, numbness in one of his legs, and chest pain that always bothered him afterwards.
In any event, they shipped him out of Belmont and sent him here. He felt terrible guilt after the suicide attempt. He believed he would never be forgiven. Terry found it hard to live, just to live.”
A tear ran down the side of the priest’s nose and he wiped it away.
“You talk about him as if he’s gone.”
“I believe he is gone. I like to think I’ll see him again, but . . . He was too good. And completely unnoticed. Everywhere he went, he was the biggest heart and the smallest presence.”
Father Keenan was crying openly now. “He is in God’s arms now. He should be. If he isn’t, then I’m in the wrong racket.”
Warren chuckled at the comment.
“I take it you are a fellow who doesn’t smile much,” said Father Keenan.
“Not much.”
“Well, Terry is surely with us then.”
The medical examiner determined that the woman who was found in a dilapidated cottage in Truro had been dead for nearly two weeks. Syringes were found in the room along with heroin residue. The body was too decomposed to lift fingerprints. The death was a small story amidst the sensational events that were being reported daily in 72-point type.
In a wall space, local police found an expired driver’s license belonging to one Ava Kittredge, along with a set of keys, a wedding band, and a photograph of an infant boy. When the news found its way to the FBI, they sent a team of agents to the cottage. The place had been wiped nearly clean of fingerprints. But a metal box on the side of the house that contained the telephone connection from the street produced a thumbprint belonging to Dale Stasiak.
One of the agents asked Baldesaro if he thought they should tell Warren the details of the squalid little cottage, of Stasiak’s presence there. “No,” he said. “There’s no need to do that.”
When Warren got the call he was saddened; he couldn’t say grief-stricken, just saddened. He didn’t want to know anything about the body in the cottage. The years of uncertainty about her whereabouts had been easier than knowing. He liked to think that she might be out there somewhere, not because he wanted her to come back but because he harbored a foolish hope that she would be living somewhere, joyous, irreverent, passionate, inaccessible, as he remembered her. For all her faults she had good in her.
52
Warren watched as James threw a bundle of sticks into the woodstove, straightened, and surveyed Mike. They were helping him with his Halloween costume: A pair of scarlet pantaloons, sequined slippers, and on his head a gold turban. “We’re definitely getting there,” James said. “You’re looking more royal by the minute.”
Grayson appeared from behind one of the columns that supported the second floor, the structural member itself hung with every type of oddity and relic that would fit until it resembled a folk totem of some kind. “I can’t find the ermine,” he said. “What’s a king without an ermine mantle?” He looked at Mike. “He looks very arabesque at this point. He’d be better off with chain mail and a scimitar.”
“Honestly. It’s about make-believe, Grayson. Mike, what do you think?” James stood him in front of the full-length mirror.
“I think I look good.”
“There you go, Grayson.”
“He looks like a Moorish warrior. Your doing.”
“Then the fur will be superfluous. Or add it if you want. It doesn’t have to be historically accurate.”
It was clear to Warren that Mike, or someone like him, was something that Grayson and James had desperately wanted, and as strange as it seemed to him—he was still getting used to the fact of two men living together the way they did—it moved him all the same.
He and Mike had been living on the property now for two weeks, staying in the big barn. Mike had been at Osterville elementary school for a month without any setbacks. In the mornings he often walked across the property and found James and Grayson in the shop, setting up for the day. They came up with endless ways to use Mike’s fascination with their inventory as a vehicle for practical instr
uction. They conducted make-believe transactions with Mike and showed him how to do the sums on the stylized receipt paper they used, small slips that read, “Antiquitus” in calligraphy.
As Warren carried on the solitary work of fixing up Grayson and James’s property, there was something that intruded on his thoughts with increasing persistence. Seeing the name “Clyde” scrawled on the defaced artwork in Dr. Hawthorne’s house had triggered a nagging familiarity. Its origins, he felt, were somewhere in the early days of the investigation. He pored over the information that he’d cajoled Jenkins into getting for him, their own record of the short-lived Lefgren investigation, and the Truro police department’s notes on the Gilbride murder.
Some calls had come in from outside jurisdictions in the days after the Lefgren killing. Police in Maine called about a truck driver with a record of accosting young girls. There was a mental patient from Pittsburgh with ties to the New England area. In a margin he had written, “carnival/Lee.” He was lucky Jenkins had included Dunleavy’s legible and more detailed notes. There, the detective had recorded that in mid-June, police in the Western Massachusetts town of Lee had questioned a man named Clyde Pommering. This was where he had heard the name, the source of the familiarity that had been bothering him.
He called the Lee police department and learned that Pommering was noticed at a carnival that was passing through, loitering around the Tilt-A-Whirl and leering at the kids. The police drove Pommering out to the Mass Turnpike and told him to disappear.
One afternoon, Warren took a break from reshingling the roof on the barn and telephoned the Lee police department. The chief remembered the incident. He described Pommering as gangly and homely. “He was a real oddball,” the chief said. “And an awful young guy to have a heart problem.”
“How’s that?”
The chief explained that when Pommering was picked up for questioning, officers found amyl nitrite capsules in his possession. Pommering claimed that they were prescribed to him by his doctor for a heart condition. The doctor—Reese Hawthorne of Provincetown—corroborated Pommering’s story, though the chief said he was not convincing. “He didn’t sound happy about it,” he said. “It sounded to me like he was just going along with the story.”
Warren left Grayson, James, and Mike to their costume-making and went into the side office and called Jenkins.
“What are you doing, Ed?”
“Me and Gladys are watching Jackie Gleason, that’s all. What about you?”
“Nothing much.”
“Settling into the new place O.K.?”
“Yes. Mike loves it here. Listen, Ed, did you ever talk to Ferrell about Dr. Hawthorne?”
“I did.”
“And what did he say?”
“He was decent about it.”
“Decent?”
“He wasn’t interested but he didn’t try to make me look like an idiot, either.”
“He’s an O.K. guy.”
“He is.”
“What do you think?” asked Warren.
“About what?”
“About Hawthorne.”
“I think Hawthorne is ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.” Warren heard Jenkins mutter, “Sorry, hon,” off to the side.
“What do you think about taking another trip out there?”
“To P-town?”
“Yes. Drop in on Dr. Hawthorne one last time.”
“You gonna go back into police work, lieutenant?”
“No.”
“They’d hire you back, I bet.”
“I wouldn’t take the job.”
“Well, at some point, you’ve got to adjust to the fact that you’re a civilian now.”
“I’m adjusting.”
“I can see that. Lieutenant, it’s done. Sooner or later they’re going to find evidence that will pin all this on Boyle. The rest of it is just . . . strangeness.”
“You’re probably right. But I’ve been doing a little calling around and there are some things I want to look into. I can explain it to you on the way out there.”
“O.K. When?”
“How about tomorrow afternoon about five?”
“Tomorrow’s Halloween. Aren’t you taking Mike out trick or treating?”
“I’m sure he’d be happy to go with Grayson and James.”
“All right. See you tomorrow.”
Dusk was falling in Provincetown when Warren and Jenkins arrived. The air was still and a bluish gray light had come down on the peninsula, the ocean flat and faintly luminescent, the white on the buildings glowing with the vestiges of the day’s dying light. Lights were on in the houses, shops, and bars. Throngs of people walked beneath the glowing plastic pumpkins and grinning witches’ heads that were strung across Commercial Street.
They found Hawthorne’s house in darkness. No one answered when they knocked. “Let’s go talk to the neighbors,” said Jenkins. They walked to the house across the street and knocked on the door. A man appeared with a package of Mint Juleps in his hand, a surprised expression on his face.
Jenkins said, “Police.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know Dr. Hawthorne across the way?”
“Kind of. He doesn’t live there anymore as far as I can tell.”
“When did he leave?”
“A couple of weeks ago. His renter might still be there, I think.”
“He has a renter?”
“Well, I’m not sure the man was renting. He was living there at any rate.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. But sometimes there’s a light on in the cellar of Dr. Hawthorne’s house. It comes and goes.”
They looked across the street. Hawthorne’s house was a dark, silent mass. “Any idea why Hawthorne might have left?”
“No.”
Jenkins took a card out of his wallet and handed it to the man. “I’m going to give you a number to call. If you see Hawthorne around . . .”
“There.”
They looked at the neighbor.
“Right there,” he said. “The light.”
Jenkins and Warren turned. A faint glow was coming from a cellar window, partially concealed by shrubbery. Without a word, they crossed the street and headed toward Hawthorne’s house. They both got down and peered through the glass. There, dressed in an adult’s skeleton suit—black fabric with white bones—was Edgar Cleve. His lips were moving but there appeared to be no one in the cellar with him. Nearby stood the oil burner and next to it a cot with a pillow and a balled-up blanket. He held a white cloth to his chest, rubbing it back and forth across himself, talking, though they could not hear what he said.
“Edgar Cleve,” Jenkins whispered.
Warren looked at him through the smudged glass, recalling the strange-looking gangly man who had sat across from him in Jenkins’s office the day of the Lefgren murder.
“Let’s see if we can get him to come out of there,” Warren said.
“You bring a weapon?”
“No. You?”
Jenkins shook his head.
“We could call the state police,” said Warren.
“They’re not going to come out here for this. This guy is nobody to them.”
Cleve took the cloth he was holding, spread it out in front of his face, and put his nose into the fabric. It was clear then that what he held was a pair of boys’ underwear.
“You see that?” Jenkins whispered. “You see what he’s got?”
Warren was silent, nodding.
Cleve let the underwear drop to the floor and sat there, rubbing his thighs, looking around the cellar. His eyes went to the window and he stopped, motionless. He took the skeleton mask that was hanging around his neck by its elastic cord, brought it up over his face, then dashed out of sight. A moment later, the cellar went
dark.
“Go around back,” Warren said. “Yell if he comes out that way.”
Warren stood on the sidewalk in front of the house. A small band of costumed children went by. In the backyard, Jenkins kept his eyes on the darkened porch, watching for movement.
They remained at their posts for ten minutes. Jenkins came around from the back. “He’s not coming out,” he said. “He’s probably watching us from one of the windows.”
“Why don’t you see if you can find a cop down on Commercial Street. Tell them Barnstable wants him for questioning and you have reason to believe he’ll resist.”
Jenkins went down Daggett Lane the way the trick-or-treaters had gone. Warren stood in the shadow of a big yew bush across the street. Cleve did not come out, nor did any lights go on. At some point during his vigil, Warren turned toward Commercial Street to look for Jenkins and saw a black-clad figure step out of a hedge and onto the sidewalk, the long, high, exaggerated motion of the leg like a bit of physical comedy, a Chaplinesque version of stealth. There was Cleve, creeping out of the adjacent yard.
Warren watched him head down to Commercial Street. He counted to ten, then began following. Cleve’s head was swiveling all around, looking for pursuers. He didn’t see Warren, who at one point ducked into the trellised entrance of a front yard. A short distance from Commercial Street, Cleve suddenly turned and caught Warren in the open. Cleve froze for a moment, standing stock-still beneath a street light, the bones on his black suit brightly articulated, the black sockets of the skull mask and the grinning teeth staring back at Warren. Warren pointed at him. “You,” he said. “Come here.” Cleve took off at a sprint.
A twinge of pain shooting through his ribs at every pounding step, Warren pursued Cleve into Commercial Street. He saw him crash into the stream of reveling pedestrians and saw their reaction, like a shock wave radiating outward from the intersection with Daggett Lane. Warren pursued; Jenkins appeared out of nowhere and fell in behind him, both of them shouting and shoving their way through.