The Church of Broken Pieces

by David Haynes

  It was the right thing for them to do, for Pace and for his mom. Even if it were an impossible task.

  *

  As Wilson walked into the kitchen, Donovan slid his cell across the worktop. “Thanks for nothing,” he said.

  The room smelled of coffee and burned toast. Donovan had a laptop on the table in front of him and was scrutinizing it carefully. A plate with a selection of bread in varying degrees of blackness sat to one side. Wilson selected the piece that looked edible and took a bite. It was cold.

  “Been up a while, huh?”

  “About an hour,” he replied and moved his finger down the screen. “She’s not in Portland, Bangor or anywhere in-between. St Andrew’s was a negative too.”

  Wilson put the toast back down and poured himself a coffee. The digital display on the oven told him it was just after eight. “Want one?” he asked, lifting the coffee pot.

  Donovan was already pressing the screen on his cell, dialing another medical facility. He held a finger in the air and nodded. Speaking into the phone, he said, “Yes, good morning, my name is Carlton Fisher of Fisher, Wilson and Donovan, attorneys at law. Our client, a Mr Richard Pace, has requested we contact you in order to make alternative arrangements regarding the care of his mother, Mrs Pace. Unfortunately there has been a change in circumstance, a rather...”

  He stopped talking for a moment and then nodded. “Yes, that’s correct. Carlton Fisher.” He paused again, smiling. “I’m based in Boothbay Harbor, but we have offices in Bangor and Plymouth.” He winked at Wilson.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, no problem, and that’s where? Thank you for checking, Sarah. You too.”

  He hung up and looked at Wilson, still grinning. “I’m getting better at that.”

  “Fisher, Wilson and Donovan?” Wilson asked.

  “Sound like attorneys, don’t they?”

  “I guess. All except Wilson,” he replied. “So where are we at? Fill me in.” He sat down beside Donovan.

  “These are the places I’ve called.” He traced a finger down a list he was keeping, then tapped the screen. “And these are the places I’ve yet to call.”

  “Okay. Want me to finish them off?”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m quite enjoying being an attorney.”

  Wilson nodded, “You almost look like one too. I’ll grab the other laptop and start researching Pace. See what he’s all about.”

  Donovan nodded, already dialing the next number. They both had a tenacious streak a mile wide but exactly where tenacity ended and stubbornness began was sometimes difficult to gauge. He suspected Donovan didn’t know either.

  He walked to the far end of the kitchen and opened the door to the workshop. It was a world away from the austere white gloss kitchen. There was junk everywhere, almost every conceivable spare inch of worktop was covered in something. It smelled the way old things smell; the scent of all the humans who had ever touched any of it. The metal signs, the engine parts, the rotten timber and the tools that made them, all imbued with the odor of humanity. Good people, bad people and those somewhere in-between, it didn’t matter which way you swung, you carried a smell that was all you and only you. The smell of skin, of hair, of breath and of blood, it was all there and if you touched something, part of you went with whatever you touched forever; an invisible historical reference to who and what you were.

  Of course, there were exceptions to the invisibility rule. Both Wilson and Donovan had left their fair share of blood lying around as reference points, particularly on vehicle renovations, but sometimes they found a stain that was more than just the result of a little nick. A mark indicating violence. Whether accidental or intentional, that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because Wilson always saw the worst in that hardened droplet of blackened blood on the arm of the antique chaise, or in that cluster of dried and matted hair on the Knucklehead’s headlamp. That was how his mind worked and he’d grown accustomed to it.

  He cleared himself a space on the workbench and powered up the laptop. It was much older than Donovan’s and didn’t possess a touchscreen, but it worked just fine and where computers were concerned, at least where he was concerned, familiarity was all important.

  He opened up Google and typed ‘Richard Pace, Maine, USA’ into the search bar. A string of results opened up but none of them were relevant. There were a couple of results for CEOs of companies in the state, and that fit nicely with Wilson’s preconception of the man, but they were dead ends. He widened the search, covering New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts but the result was the same.

  It was possible he could continue all day and search the entire country, even the globe, and find zilch, but he was nothing if not stubborn. He extended the search again and was rewarded with exactly what he had been looking for – a photograph of the man who had blown his brains out in the yard yesterday.

  Although it was undoubtedly the same man, right down to his expensive suit and haircut, there was something different about him. It took Wilson a moment to realize what it was. The man in the photograph looked happy, alive, full of drive. The Richard Pace they met yesterday looked exhausted. The suit, the haircut, the smile, it was all there, but there was nothing left behind his eyes. He was literally out on his feet. He was beaten.

  He was on the board of directors for a medium-sized engineering company in New York, something to do with finance. The company website gave a brief résumé of his professional life. A graduate of the University of Michigan with eight years under his belt at the company, he was made finance director five years ago. His CV was impressive, if not exceptional. Wilson supposed he was like thousands of others in the same position.

  There were a few other mentions of his name, but all of them related to his position at the company and their involvement in the local economy. A photograph of him at a function showed him standing alongside three couples. It didn’t appear he was with anyone. The photograph reinforced the lack of a wedding ring on Pace’s finger.

  There was little else about him other than a perfectly respectable professional existence. Richard Pace appeared to be for living the American dream, striving to better himself.

  “Just look at the computer whizz-kid go! Fingers of fire, Frankie. Fingers of fire. Not exactly earth-shattering, is it?”

  Wilson hadn’t even heard Donovan come in behind him. He looked over his shoulder. “Did you come here to give me a hard time or to give me an update?”

  “I’d like to do both.” Donovan replied.

  Wilson closed the laptop and stood up. “I need some food.” He pushed past Donovan and stepped into the kitchen. He didn’t understand why he felt frustrated. Had he hoped to find that Richard Pace was recently escaped from an institution? Maybe it would be easier to understand why he’d done what he did, if that were the case. But it wasn’t. Pace appeared to be your average accountant; made good, no doubt, but an accountant nonetheless. It wasn’t exactly a profession known for those prone to drastic flights of imagination either. Whatever it was that finally made Pace come to him for help, there was no doubt it was the last throw of the dice. Last but one, anyway.

  “Plenty of pizza out there,” Donovan shouted

  Wilson went straight to the refrigerator and grabbed a cold slice. He folded it into his mouth and chewed. A few seconds later Donovan appeared beside him.

  “Good, huh?” Donovan grabbed a slice. “Fancy a trip up-state?” He took a bite of the pizza.

  “Huh?”

  “To visit Mrs Frances Pace?”

  “You found her?” Wilson was surprised, although he knew he shouldn’t be. Donovan was probably a better detective than half of the state’s police department.

  “Yup. Got tired of phoning every hospital and clinic in the state and then I remembered Pace said something about her being in a new facility, you remember that?”

  Wilson nodded although he didn’t recall that detail.

  “Only two new medical facilities built in the last five years. One of them was
for pets, the other for humans. Not a tough guess which one we want, is it?”

  “Have you talked to them?” Wilson asked.

  “Briefly.” Donovan spat crumbs into Wilson’s face. “They want me to email some paperwork over before they’ll agree to see us. Signatures from Richard Pace, proof of our position. All that nonsense.”

  Wilson’s spirits dropped. “But we can’t provide them with any of that.”

  Donovan wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Sure we can. I’ve already sent them a link to Fisher, Wilson and Donovan – Attorneys at Law. Getting Pace’s signature is just a case of copying from his company’s mission statement. Don’t worry...”

  “You’ve sent them what?”

  “A link to the website. Our lawyer’s office.”

  “What? What website?”

  Donovan patted him on the back and walked past him. “Come on, man, keep up. Sometimes having a legal team behind us is useful, helps with the leverage.” He stopped by the office door. “How do you think we managed to get Old Sparky from Ohio? There’s a lot of legal red tape to cut through when you’re trying to buy an electric chair from the state penitentiary.”

  “But we haven’t got a legal team.”

  Donovan raised his finger. “No, but we have a website that says we do. It’s got photographs and everything. Remember when I got you to put that suit on for Halloween?”

  Wilson shook his head. “No!”

  Donovan turned away, disappearing into the office. “Better dig it out, Frank Wilson, attorney at law. You’re going to need it.”

  5

  Hemlock Mill was located on the banks of the Kennebec River in Lincoln County, a little way upstream from the county seat of Augusta. This, Wilson learned as he drove, was where they were heading.

  Donovan tapped away at the screen on his computer. “Big-time paper mills all around here but Hemlock was the biggest by far. Peak time was in the Seventies, producing nearly twenty percent of newsprint for the whole country.” Donovan whistled to emphasize his point.

  “What about now?” Wilson asked, although he had a feeling he might know the answer.

  “Zip,” Donovan replied. “Went out of business four years ago.”

  Wilson nodded. A lot of the mills had closed over the last twenty years and those that had somehow managed to stay afloat now used their process to produce more than just paper. Hemlock, it appeared, had been one of the unlucky ones.

  Wilson ran his fingers around the collar of his ill-fitting shirt. The last time he remembered wearing a shirt and tie had been his mom’s funeral. Seven years had passed since then; seven years, a lot of beer and cold pizza, and the collar chafed.

  “Lying like this feels very uncomfortable,” he said.

  “Who’s lying?” Donovan replied.

  “Err... you, John,” Wilson answered.

  “I haven’t lied. We were trying to find Mrs Pace. I haven’t lied about that.”

  “But you told them you were an attorney. That was a lie.”

  “Ah,” Donovan turned in his seat as if he were about to divulge something of great import. “But, if you tell a lie within a larger truth, it’s not a lie. The larger truth, especially if it’s for a good purpose, takes precedence, canceling out everything else.”

  “What?”

  “The key here is the overall purpose. You wanted to find her, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And that’s a good and honest endeavor, isn’t it?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Then anything after that becomes null and void. It doesn’t matter because we’re on the good side.” Donovan was smiling.

  “So we can lie to anyone and our conscience is clear? We can spout all manner of bullshit and it doesn’t matter because we’re the good guys.”

  “Exactly!” Donovan said and turned back to his tablet.

  Wilson couldn’t help but laugh at the logic. “And you honestly believe that?”

  “Of course. Now take the next exit, we’re nearly there.”

  Wilson turned off Route 201 and passed the town limits sign. “Hemlock Mill.”

  “Not like the poison,” said Donovan, “like the wood. Although...”

  Buildings came down on either side of the road like any other small town in semi-rural Maine. There were a few small independent stores, hardware supplies, a diner and a bar but there were also a number of vacant and boarded-up buildings with estate agent signs hanging on the front. The signs couldn’t hide the desolate emptiness behind them.

  Several people moved about on the sidewalk, walking up and down, carrying groceries and going about their daily business, but not many. Wilson drove slowly but nobody looked up, or seemed to notice, or have any interest.

  They passed the Big Mill Motel. It was set back from the road on a weed-infested lot with flaking paint covering the entire front elevation. It looked like it belonged in the Seventies, when it had probably been built. Probably the last time it had been painted. A sign that once had brightly colored neon tubes running all over it hung from a rusted post just beside the highway. The sign was now less flamboyant than it once was. Letters of differing sizes, possibly from a child’s ‘learn to spell’ collection, delivered a depressing message:

  The Big Mill Motel – Rooms $55

  Cable and Hot Water!

  “Putting the exclamation point after the hot water makes it sound like that’s a luxury,” Donovan remarked. “Like saying, look at us, we’ve got hot water. Hot water, I tell you!”

  A couple of white plastic garden chairs were left beneath the sign. They were spotted with blooms of lichen and one of them was missing a leg. It leaned on the other one like a whiskey-drunk bum.

  Wilson eased down on the pedal. A more depressing place he hadn’t seen for a very long time.

  “Looks like a place I stayed in once, over in Texas.” Donovan turned in his seat. “Right next door to a bar called Dixie Divas, it was. And what do you know? None of the girls in Dixie Divas could afford to buy shirts. Or bras.”

  “Sounds like your type of place.”

  Donovan nodded. “Whole place smelled like someone stuffed a sweaty sock with a couple of kilos of salami and pushed it under the floorboards to ripen.”

  “Nice,” Wilson said. “Keep going up there?”

  “At the crossroads, turn left.” He tapped the screen on the computer. “That’s what this says anyway.”

  A little farther on from the motel, they stopped at a red light on the crossroads. Not one vehicle came through the intersection in the time they waited. In front, the road continued dead straight for another mile or so and then curved off sharply into the hemlock and pine forest. To the right the town continued downward, and at the foot of the slope the Kennebec River flowed slowly toward Augusta. The languid water, gray as the sky, looked as lifeless as the houses built along its bank; cookie-cutter homes that swept in wide arc on the curve of the river toward the highway then back up to the town. Such as it was.

  These homes had been built for the mill workers, upon whose toil the town grew to be one of the most prosperous settlements along the Kennebec. There were a few flashes of color from late-blooming hanging baskets, car hoods or kids’ bicycles but otherwise it was a bleak picture. Most of the houses, Wilson knew, would have the same For Sale! boards posted on their weed-infested lawns as the stores had screwed to their windows. The same agent had either been unlucky, or lucky, to get so much business out of Hemlock. It was probably an agent in Portland or Bangor, some place that didn’t need to rely on a defunct paper mill in order to stay alive.

  Wilson was glad to be turning away, out of town and away from the bleak reality of what was left of Hemlock Mill.

  The car was filled with a sudden depressing gloom. Wilson felt it trickling in through the vents, writhing slowly around his body and caressing his flesh. He saw Donovan wipe something from his cheek and then scratch at his arm. He’d felt it too. They both had.

  �
��How many seasons you reckon Tom Brady’s got left in him?” Donovan asked.

  It was probably the first question that came into his mind. It could have been anything; puerile subjects like the weather or the price of gas would have done just as well. The subject wasn’t important, speaking and hearing the words was. It was a soul shiver and it took both of them away from whatever gloomy realm passing through Hemlock Mill had delivered them to.

  “Two maybe,” Wilson replied. That was the end of the conversation. That was all it needed to be.

  A minute later, they passed a chapel on Wilson’s side. It too was set back from the road, but it stood out for a different reason to the Big Mill Motel. It was immaculate. The timber cladding wasn’t just white, it was luminescent, despite the lack of any real sun. The lot was well tended, and flowers had been planted in pots and hanging baskets everywhere. The modest steeple reached into the sky and atop it a black cross punctured the gray clouds with its powerful silhouette. They both turned their heads as they passed.

  On the other side of the road and in contrast to the startling chapel were a number of dilapidated sheds and abandoned, rusted tools. Both the sheds and the tools seemed to have been picked up and dropped randomly across the vacant field. Beyond the grass, the dark expanse of the hemlock and pine forest stretched as far as the eye could see. Wilson glanced across and then turned back to the road. Fractures zigzagged across the hardtop as it climbed out of the doldrums. The cracks were easier to look at than the signs of human abandonment.

  “Much farther?” Wilson asked. He wanted to be off this road.

  “Nope,” Donovan replied, squinting and leaning forward. “I believe we are here.”

  Wilson leaned over the wheel. On the brow of the hill was a large building he’d disregarded as another derelict reminder of the mill business. The closer he drove, the more he realized how much he had been mistaken. It was a house. Or rather an antebellum plantation mansion, more suited to the heat and humidity of Louisiana than late fall in Maine.