Dark Hollow

by John Connolly

  She took a sip of coffee and I used it as an opportunity to interrupt.

  "What about Rita Ferris and Cheryl Lansing? Could he have been responsible for their deaths?"

  "It's possible," said Rachel. She regarded me quietly, waiting for me to find a connection.

  "I'm missing something," I said at last. "That's why you look like the cat that got the cream."

  "You're forgetting the mutilation of the mouths. The damage inflicted on the wombs of those girls in 1965 was meant to convey a message. The mutilations were a signifier. We've seen damage to victims used in that way before, Bird." The smile went away, and I nodded: the Traveling Man.

  "So, once again, three decades later, we have mutilations, in this case directed to the mouths of victims and in each case meant to signify something different. Rita Ferris's mouth was sewn shut. What does that mean?"

  "That she should have kept her mouth shut?"

  "Probably," said Rachel. "It's not subtle, but whoever killed her wasn't interested in subtlety."

  I considered what Rachel had said for a moment before I figured out what it might mean. "She called the cops on Billy Purdue and they took him away." That could have meant that he had been watching the house the night Billy was arrested, making him the old man that Billy claimed to have seen the night Rita and Donald were killed, maybe even the same old man who had attacked Rita at the hotel.

  "In Cheryl Lansing's case," continued Rachel, "her jaw was broken and her tongue torn out. I'm pushing the envelope a little here, but my guess is that she was being punished for not speaking."

  "Because she was party to the concealment of the child's birth."

  "That would seem to be a plausible explanation. In the end, regardless of what made Caleb Kyle this way, and regardless of signifiers and whatever grievances he may feel, he's a killing machine, completely without remorse."

  "But he felt something for the loss of his child."

  Rachel almost leapt from her chair. "Yes!" She beamed at me the way a teacher might beam at a particularly bright pupil. "The problem, or the key, is the sixth girl, the one who was never found. For a whole lot of reasons, most of which would probably result in me being ostracized by my peers if I stated them in print, I think your grandfather was right when he suspected that she was also a victim, but he was wrong in the type of victim."

  "I don't understand."

  "Your grandfather assumed that she had also been killed but had not been displayed for some reason."

  "And you don't." But I could see where she was going, and my stomach tightened at the possibility. It had been at the back of my mind for some time and, maybe, at the back of my grandfather's. I think he hoped that she was dead, because the other option was worse.

  "No, I don't believe she was killed, and it comes back to the torture inflicted on those girls. This wasn't simply a means of gaining satisfaction and fulfillment for this man: it was a test. He was testing their strength, knowing at the same time, but perhaps not admitting it to himself, that they would fail his test because they simply weren't strong enough.

  "But look at the profile of Judith Mundy. She's strong, well built, a dominant personality. She didn't cry easily, could handle herself in a fight. She would pass that kind of test, to the extent that he probably didn't have to hurt her very much to realize that she was different."

  Rachel leaned forward and the expression on her face changed to one of deep abiding sorrow. "She wasn't taken because she was weak, Bird. She was taken because she was strong."

  I closed my eyes. I knew now what had happened to Judith Mundy, why she had not been found, and Rachel knew that I had understood.

  "She was taken as breeding stock, Bird," she said quietly. "He took her to breed on."

  Rachel offered to drive me to Logan, but I declined. She had done enough for me, more even than I felt I had a right to ask. As I walked alongside her across Harvard Square, I felt a love for her made all the more intense by the fact that I believed she was slipping further and further away from me.

  "You think this man Caleb may be connected to the disappearance of Ellen Cole?" she asked. Her arm brushed against mine, and for the first time since I had come to Boston, she did not pull away from the contact.

  "I don't know for sure," I replied. "Maybe the police are right. Maybe her hormones got to her and she did run away, in which case I'm not sure what I'm doing. But an old man found her and drew her to Dark Hollow and, like I keep telling people, I don't believe in coincidences.

  "I have a feeling about this man, Rachel. He's come back, and I think he's returned for Billy Purdue and to avenge himself on everyone who helped to hide him. I think he killed Rita Ferris. It may have been out of jealousy, or to cut Billy off so that he'd have no other ties, or because she was going to leave him and take the boy with her. I don't think that Donald was meant to die. Caleb would have wanted his grandson alive but, somehow, Donald became involved in the struggle. My guess is that he was fatally injured when Caleb tried to push him away."

  Something caught in my throat at the memory of Donald, and I didn't speak again until we reached the square. I put out my hand to Rachel. I didn't kiss her because I didn't feel that I had the right. She took my hand and held it tightly.

  "Bird, this man feels he has some dispensation to avenge himself on anyone who crosses him because he believes that he's been wronged. I've just labeled him as psychopathic." In her eyes, there was concern, and more.

  "In other words, what's my excuse?" I smiled, but it went no deeper than my mouth.

  "They're gone, Bird. Susan and Jennifer are dead, and what happened to them and to you was a terrible, terrible thing. But every time you make someone pay for what was done to you, you hurt yourself and you risk becoming the thing you hate. Do you understand?"

  "It's not about me, Rachel," I replied softly. "At least, not entirely. Someone has to stop these people. Someone has to take responsibility." There was that echo again.

  they are all your responsibility.

  Her hand moved gently over mine, her fingers on my fingers, her thumb rubbing lightly on my palm, then she touched my face with her free hand. "Why did you come here? Most of what I told you, you could have figured out for yourself."

  "I'm not that smart."

  "Don't bullshit a bullshitter."

  "So it's true what they say about psychologists."

  "Only the New Age ones. You're avoiding the question."

  "I know. You're right: some of it I had guessed, or half-guessed, but I needed to hear it back from someone else, otherwise I was afraid that I was going crazy. But I'm also here because I still care about you, because when you walked away you took something from me. I thought that this might be a way of getting closer to you. I wanted to see you again. Maybe, deep down, that's all it was." I looked away from her.

  Her grip tightened on my hand. "I saw what you did, back in Louisiana. You didn't go there to find the Traveling Man. You went there to kill him, and anyone who stood in your way got hurt, and got hurt badly. Your capacity for inflicting violence scared me. You scared me."

  "I didn't know what else to do, not then."

  "And now?"

  I was about to answer when her finger touched the scar on my cheek, the mark left by Billy Purdue's blade. "How did this happen?" she asked.

  "A man stuck a knife blade in me."

  "And what did you do?"

  I paused before answering. "I walked away."

  "Who was he?"

  "Billy Purdue."

  Her eyes widened, and it was as if something that had been curled inside her to protect itself gradually began to unfurl. I could see it in her, could feel it in her touch.

  "He never had a chance, Rachel. The odds were stacked against him from the start."

  "If I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly?" she said.

  "I've always tried to be honest with you," I replied.

  She nodded. "I know, but this is important. I need to be sure of this
."

  "Ask."

  "Do you need the violence?"

  I thought about the question. In the past, I had been motivated by personal revenge. I had hurt people, had killed people, because of what had been done to Susan and to Jennifer, and to me. Now that desire for revenge had dwindled, easing a little every day, and the spaces it left as it receded were filled with the potential for reparation. I bore some responsibility for what happened to Susan and Jennifer. I didn't think that I would ever come to terms with that knowledge, but I could try to make up for it in some small way, to acknowledge my failings in the past by using them to make the present better.

  "I did, for a time," I admitted.

  "And now?"

  "I don't need it, but I will use it if I have to. I won't stand by and watch innocent people being hurt."

  Rachel leaned over and kissed me gently on the cheek. Her eyes were soft when she pulled away.

  "So you're the avenging angel," she said.

  "Something like that," I replied.

  "Good-bye, then, avenging angel," Rachel whispered softly.

  She turned and walked away, back to the library and her work. She didn't look back, but her head was down and I could feel the weight of her thoughts.

  The plane rose from Logan, heading upward and north through the cold air, heavy cloud surrounding it like the breath of God. I thought of Sheriff Tannen, who had promised to hunt up the most recent pictures available of Caleb Kyle. They would be thirty years old, but at least they would be something. I took the blurred newspaper photo of Caleb from my grandfather's folder and looked at it again and again. He was like a skeleton slowly being fleshed out, as if the process of decay were being gradually, irrevocably reversed. A figure that had been little more than a name, a shape glimpsed in the shadows, was assuming an objective reality.

  I know you, I thought. I know you.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I arrived in Bangor early that afternoon, picked up my car in the airport parking lot and started back for Dark Hollow. I felt like I was being pulled in ten different directions, yet somehow each one seemed to lead me back to the same place, to the same conclusion, by different routes: Caleb Kyle had come back. He had killed a girl in Texas shortly after his release from prison, probably as an act of revenge against a whole community. Then he had assumed his mother's name and headed north, far north, eventually losing himself in the wilderness.

  If Emily Watts had told the truth to Mrs. Schneider-and there was no reason to doubt her-then she had given birth to a child and hidden it because she believed its father to be a killer of young women, and sensed that this man wanted the child for his own purposes. The leap required was to accept that this child might be Billy Purdue, and that his father could be Caleb Kyle.

  Meanwhile, Ellen Cole and her boyfriend were still missing, as was Willeford. Tony Celli had gone to ground, but was undoubtedly still searching for some trace of Billy. He had no choice: if he did not find Billy, he would be unable to replace the money he had lost and he would be killed as an example to others. I had a suspicion that it was already too late for Tony Clean, that it had been too late from the very moment that he had purchased the securities, maybe even from the time when the thought of using someone else's money to secure his future first crossed his mind. Tony would do whatever he had to do to track Billy down, but everything he did, all of the violence he inflicted and all of the attention it drew to himself and his masters, made it less and less likely that he would be allowed to live. He was like a man who, trapped in the darkness of a tunnel, focuses his mind on the only illumination he sees before him, unaware that what he believes to be the light of salvation is, in reality, the fire that will consume him.

  There were other reasons, too, to be fearful. Somewhere in the darkness, Stritch waited. I imagined that he still wanted the money but, more than that, he wanted revenge for the death of his partner. I thought of the dead man in the Portland complex, violated in his last moments by Stritch's foulness, and I thought too of the fear that I had felt, the certainty that I could have allowed death to embrace me in those shadows if I had chosen to do so.

  There remained also the old man in the forest. There was still the chance that he knew something more than he had told me, that his remark about the two young people was based on more than gossip he had overheard in the town. For that reason, there was one stop to be made before I returned to Dark Hollow.

  At Orono, the store was still open. On the sign above the door, the words "Stuckey Trading" were illuminated from below, the name written in script. Inside, it smelled musty and felt oppressively warm, the AC making a noise as if glass were grinding in its works while it pumped stale air through its vents. Some guys in biker jackets were examining secondhand shotguns while a woman in a dress that was new when Woodstock convened flicked through a box of eight-tracks. Display cases held old watches and gold chains, while hunting bows stood upright on a rack beside the counter.

  I wasn't sure what I was looking for, so I browsed from shelf to shelf, from old furniture to almost-new car-seat covers, until something caught my eye. In one corner, beside a rack of foul-weather clothing-old slickers mainly, and some faded yellow oilskins-stood two rows of shoes and boots. Most of them were ragged and worn, but the Zamberlans stood out immediately. They were men's boots, relatively new and considerably more expensive than the pairs surrounding them, and some care had obviously been lavished on them recently. Someone, probably the store owner, had cleaned and waxed them before putting them out for sale. I lifted one and sniffed the interior. It smelled of Lysol, and something else: earth, and rotting meat. I lifted the second boot and caught the same faint odor from it. Ricky had been wearing Zamberlans on the day they came to visit me, I recalled, and it wasn't often that boots so fine turned up in an out-of-the-way secondhand goods store. I brought the pair of boots to the counter.

  The man behind the register was small with thick, dark artificial hair that seemed to have come from the head of a department store mannequin. Beneath the wig, at the back of his neck, wisps of his own mousy-colored strands peered out like mad relatives consigned to the attic. A pair of round eyeglasses hung from a string around his neck and lost themselves in the hairs of his chest. His bright red shirt was half unbuttoned and I could see scarring at the left side of his chest. His hands were thin and strong looking, with the little finger and ring finger of his left hand missing from just above the first joint. The nails on the fingers that remained were neatly clipped.

  He caught me looking at his mutilated left hand and raised it in front of his face, the twin stumps of the lost fingers making his hand look as if he was trying to form a gun with it, the way little kids do in the school yard.

  "Lost them in a sawmill," he explained.

  "Careless," I replied.

  He shrugged. "Blade damn near took the rest of my fingers as well. You ever work in a sawmill?"

  "No. I always thought my fingers looked okay on my hands. I like them that way."

  He looked at the stumps thoughtfully. "It's strange, but I can still feel them, y'know, like they're still there. Maybe you don't know how that feels."

  "I think I do," I said. "You Stuckey?"

  "Yessir. This is my place."

  I put the boots down on the counter.

  "They're good boots," he said, picking up one with his unmutilated hand. "Won't take less than sixty bucks for 'em. Just waxed 'em, buffed 'em and put 'em out for sale myself not two hours ago."

  "Smell them."

  Stuckey narrowed his eyes and put his head to one side. "Say what?"

  "I said, 'Smell them.'"

  He looked at me oddly for a few moments, then took one boot and sniffed the inside tentatively, his nostrils twitching like a rabbit's before the snare.

  "I don't smell nothin'," he said.

  "Lysol. You smell Lysol, don't you?"

  "Well, sure. I always disinfect ' em before I sell 'em. Don't nobody want to wear boots that stink."


  I leaned forward and raised the second boot in front of him. "You see," I said softly, "that's my question. What did they smell of before you cleaned them?"

  He wasn't a man who was easily intimidated. He thrust his body forward in turn, six knuckles on the counter, and arched an eyebrow at me. "Are you some kind of nut?"

  In a mirror behind the counter, I saw that the bikers had turned around to watch the show. I kept my voice low. "These boots, they had earth on them when you bought them, didn't they? And they smelled of decay?"

  He took a step back. "Who are you?"

  "Just a guy."

  "You was just a guy, you'da bought the durned boots and been gone by now."

  "Who sold you the boots?"

  He was becoming belligerent now. "That's none of your goddamned business, mister. Now get out of my store."

  I didn't move. "Listen, friend, you can talk to me, or you can talk to the cops, but you will talk, understand? I don't want to make trouble for you, but if I have to, I will."

  Stuckey stared at me, and he knew that I meant what I said. A voice interrupted before he could respond. "Hey, Stuck," said one of the bikers. "You okay back there?"

  He raised his battered left hand to indicate that there wasn't a problem, then returned his attention to me. There was no trace of bitterness when he spoke. Stuckey was a pragmatist-in his line of business, you had to be-and he knew when to back down.

  "It was an old fella from up north," he sighed. "He comes in here maybe once a month, brings stuff that he's found. Most of it's junk, but I give him a few bucks for it and he goes away again. Sometimes, he brings in something good."

  "He bring these in recently?"

  "Yesterday. I gave him thirty bucks for 'em. Brought in a backpack too, Lowe Alpine. I sold it straight off. That was about it. He didn't have nothin' else to offer."

  "This old guy from up Dark Hollow way?"

  "Yeah, that's right, Dark Hollow."

  "You got a name?"

  His eyes narrowed again. "Just tell me, mister, what are you: some kind of private cop?"