The Wolf in Winter (2014)

by John Connolly

  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 fnd 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 ffteen minutes after the shower had stopped running and her husband had still not emerged. Bryan Joblin had fallen asleep in the armchair by the fre. 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, smelling his hair and his skin. She detected only soap.

  'You smell fne,' 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 offce, 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 frst. 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 fnd 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 it 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 knocking 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 piss . . .'

  28

  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 only bring to mind a handful of occasions on which he had woken with some memory of his dreams. He couldn't associate them with any particularly diffcult or traumatic moments 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 sliding 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 frst night, when he claimed to have seen an animal on the road. He should have connected the sighting with the garbage bags that had been 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 cloth 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 fne. 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'd been 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 for trying 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 fnding himself surrounded by a wolf pack – what would happen then? The same thing that happened to Elspeth Ramsay's hound, perhaps, or the same thing that happened to the girl, except 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 fnger 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, traffc 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 selfsh 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 in the course of a hunt.

  He took a sip of bourbon and tried to pretend he was chief of police in a normal town. 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 it 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 fnished his drink. He should have called Hayley Conyer to tell her of the wolf and the turmoil at the grave site, but he did not. He'd had his fll of Hayley. The call could wait until the morning. Tomorrow he would see about putting together a hunting party, and they'd fnd 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 overfowing with the kind of dogs that might be useful in a confrontation with a wolf anyway, not unless he had missed a news fash about the hidden strength of labradoodles. Trapping seemed to be the most effective way to deal with the animal, but they might be lucky enough to get it under their guns frst, 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 over the days that followed were all very similar: triple tragedy strikes small town; maine town mourns its dead; trouble comes in threes for closeknit community . . .

  In Afghanistan, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter carrying four US 'military advisors' and crew went down in Kandahar. Three of the men survived the crash, which was caused by a mechanical failure, but they did not survive the frefght 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 identifed 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.

  'Hi, Marie? This is Valerie Gillson. Yes, I'm fne, 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 still okay.

  'Sorry, Marie, I just noticed—'

  Valerie Gillson never got to tell Marie what she had 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 deer, its legs entwined with dark roots.

  But of the deer itself, there was no sign.

  And in the gunsmithery at the back of his store, Ben Pearson was carrying his favorite hunting rife 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 it made sense to do as Morland said. The bullet had gone straight through the girl, and Ben hadn't been able to fnd any trace of it, try as he might. The rife 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 it 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 rife in the woods. It would represent his own small sacrifce, an act of recompense.

  For the frst, and last, time, Ben stumbled in his workshop, a place that he had known for decades. As he fell, his fnger slipped inside the trigger guard. The rife should not have been loaded. As far as Ben was concerned, the rife 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 rife in his arms as he died.

  29

  Ihad been anticipating the call from Euclid Dane ever since

  the frst reports began to link the deaths of the soldiers in Afghanistan to the town of Prosperous. A traffc 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 soldiers 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 websites of the New York Times and USA Today. The task of dealing with the media fell to Hayley Conyer, 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, dignifed, and distant. She gave the reporters just enough to keep them from prying further, but in repeating the same soundbites 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 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 fnished the fnal 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 the 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.