Andie’s gun skittered across the gravel in the echoing silence. Somewhere up the hill in the woods, a little girl screamed.
‘Alive!’ the creature bellowed.
Her hand went numb and she felt the cold snap of the wet strips of camouflage as he slipped in behind her and what felt like an iron bar closed across her windpipe. She cocked her elbows and hammered backward into the creature’s solar plexus. He grunted, not with pain but with pleasure.
‘We’re going to the other side, Angel!’ he whispered. ‘But this time we’re going together.’
He closed the choke hold at her neck and ground his pelvis tight against her buttocks. She tried to scream, but couldn’t. Unconsciousness came for Andie in dots that danced against the full moon and the pale stars like fireflies on a sultry August night.
Just before blackout, she fought one last time to sip air through her nostrils. In that trickle she smelled something saline and primal and thought, this is what it must be like to drown tangled in a bed of seaweed.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
FRIDAY, MAY 22
‘SHE’S DEAD, ISN’T SHE?’ Gallagher demanded frantically. ‘You’re going to find her in a ditch somewhere with one of those goddamned drawings stuck to her, aren’t you?’
‘Mr Gallagher, calm down …’ Lieutenant Brigid Bowman said.
His attention jumped off her to dart around the crowded squad room of detectives hushed at his outburst. ‘Why are you all just sitting here?
‘Or don’t you care?’ he asked, softer, more bewildered now than angry. ‘That’s been it from the beginning, isn’t it? You’ve all written her off the way everyone writes off the drunks in their lives.’
The entire room whirled. Andie had been missing for nearly fourteen hours. The plainclothes troopers had arrived at the clock shop only to find signs of a struggle in the soft soil, Andie’s footprints, a size-thirteen footprint, her service pistol, an empty 9mm shell casing and a tennis ball. Loomis and his daughters were sure they’d heard a shot before her truck started and drove off. Her Toyota was discovered a mile away on a logging road in the woods. Gallagher landed in West Lebanon at nine a.m., almost a half-day after Andie went missing.
Bowman took him by the elbow and ushered him out of the squad room and down the hall into her office. An eight-by-ten glossy of a younger Andie Nightingale in dress trooper uniform lay on the desk. He gazed at it with a tubular and rancorous anxiety, trying desperately to avoid the idea she might be gone from his life forever.
The lieutenant’s normally stiff bearing had melted and her voice quivered with emotion. ‘I haven’t handled much of this case the way I should have because I didn’t believe in Andie Nightingale the way I should have,’ she confessed. ‘Maybe it’s because, as the only other woman in BCI, I expected more out of her. That’s something I may have to live with for a long time. But every person in this department cares. Every man and woman out there in that room is into their second or third shift since she went missing.
‘Copies of her picture are in every police car from Virginia to Quebec,’ Bowman went on. ‘Her face will be on the news all over New England tonight. And we’ve got all-points bulletins out for Chief Kerris and Monsignor McColl.’
‘Why don’t you just search their houses?’ Gallagher demanded.
‘Because we have something called the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution,’ she replied. ‘If we search without probable cause, we violate their rights. Based on the evidence we have, I don’t think a judge would grant me a search warrant on either of them. We need more.’
Gallagher sat in a chair with his head in his hands, then remembered Danby. From his briefcase he remembered the picture Harold had given him. It turned out that Andie had briefed Bowman on Danby’s early history and his relationship with McColl before leaving for Loomis’ farm. Gallagher filled her in on the rest.
Bowman sucked in her cheeks. ‘I’ll make sure this picture goes out over the wires immediately. Now go home, Mr Gallagher—you’ve done enough already.’
A ball worked its way up the back of his throat at the thought of being alone in the cabin; then he blurted out: ‘All I’ve been able to think is that I’m going to lose her.’
A throat was cleared behind him. Gallagher turned to find a plump, redheaded man waving his fingers into the open doorway.
‘Yes, what is it, Shaddock?’ Bowman asked.
‘Sorry, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing and … could I say something to Patrick Gallagher?’
‘Do I know you?’ Gallagher asked.
‘The dispatcher,’ Shaddock said, taking a step into the room. ‘I just wanted to tell you that when she talked about you—well, I’ve known Andie a long time, poor girl. And when she talked about you, Patrick, I never saw her so happy. I hope she told you.’
Out Bowman’s window, Gallagher could see the stultifying air mass that had gripped Washington, D.C., now hovering over Vermont, choking the hillsides in a muggy embrace.
Gallagher’s entire body felt shot with painkiller during the hour drive back from Bethel to Lawton. Andie’s disappearance was the lead story on an all-news radio station out of Burlington. In one of the reports, Mayor Bruce Powell did everything but execute a backflip to distance the town from the murders. No mention was made of Chief Mike Kerris, Monsignor Timothy McColl or Terrance Danby.
Gallagher drove aimlessly around the town, hating the brilliant light and the heat. Here on the river bottom, winter was vanquished, yet he found no joy in the first crab apple blossoms, the maple leaves tearing through their bud walls or the flocks of bluebirds, orioles and barn swallows flitting in the sky. A cow moose with her calf crossed the road in front of him. His mind centered on Emily, and he opened the door and threw up.
A half-dozen television transmission trucks were parked at City Hall. Cruising down Main Street past the trucks, he had a straightaway view up the flank of Lawton Mountain toward Gorm Ridge. There, at the very top, the trees remained dead and gray.
Midafternoon, Gallagher finally drove up the River Road, intending to head toward the solitude of the cabin. But as he passed the farm, he was overcome by the need to be close to things that were Andie’s.
He parked in her yard, climbed out and was immediately attacked by a cloud of black, biting flies hatching in the sudden warmth. Their scissors teeth drew blood at his neck and forehead and ears and he ran inside to escape them.
The house was silent. The fallen-leaf scent of her hung thick in the air.
Tess meowed and strolled out from the front room. Gallagher poured some dry food in her bowl and stroked her back while she ate. The cat curled in his lap as he sat in Andie’s chair and read the copies Lieutenant Bowman had made for him of Libby Curtin’s section of Many Horses’ journal as well as Charun’s last note.
I fucked Angel blindfolded and ear-plugged right to the far shore. Fucked until she stepped into the muddy water and climbed beyond.
I stayed in my Persephone warm and alive. Warm and dead. Cold and dead, but even with the cord lashed tight around us, I never saw. I left her on the bank and she walked on while I rowed back alone.
You think you know me now, Lawton, but you don’t. I am the boatman. I am the lover. I am the shaman and I am the mutator.
Summer comes. And Hades has returned Persephone to Earth. I have seen her. I will have her again for one more boat ride.
Gallagher’s blood ran cold at the images of necrophilia he wove. He turned over the note and studied the drawing. The monster seemed to taunt him with the knowledge that he had his life in his hands. He threw the drawing down, got up and wandered aimlessly through the darkened house, searching for those places where Andie’s scent was pooled.
Her fragrance was strongest at the mouth of the closet in her bedroom and Gallagher stood there hyperventilating until he collapsed in a heap on the rug. The cat watched impassively from the doorway.
Gallagher closed his eyes and tried to sleep. In his mind all memori
es were tinged in scarlet. Andie walked by, gloriously naked, and he reached out toward her stomach, only to have it turn into Emily’s stomach.
Gallagher groaned and wrapped his arms around his head as if to ward off sharp blows. But there was no stopping the pain now.
Six months after Emily had left him to go to Mexico, she strolled unannounced into an editing facility Jerry and he had rented in Manhattan for postproduction work Emily had gained a few pounds, which became her. She was tan and wore a very loose black cotton shift. The instant Gallagher looked up from the video screen and saw her, he had fantasized about a reconciliation.
A hundred times a day for the entire six months Emily had been in Mexico, he’d fantasized about a reconciliation. At least ten times a day he’d thought about flying south to find her. But a part of him had held back. A part of him knew she had to return on her own. Only then could their life go on, a partnership that looked perfect on paper and had functioned well except for one brief, rocky period.
Emily told Jerry to take lunch, then shut the door behind her.
‘Mexico looks good on you,’ Gallagher said, more than a little nervous. ‘Cripes, Em, you’re glowing!’
He came around the editing console to hug her. She did not rush to embrace him, but did allow his arms to come around her. He pulled her to him and his stomach pressed against a large round ball.
Gallagher stepped back flooded with relief, fear and, from deep, deep within, a trickle of something warm and hopeful that he didn’t understand. ‘You’re pregnant,’ he croaked.
‘Five months,’ she said brightly. She put her hands on her stomach. ‘The kicking just started a week ago. It’s incredible.’
‘Here,’ Gallagher said, pulling up a chair. ‘You should sit down.’
He stared at her belly, feeling that trickle of hope grow to a stream and then to a river. Emily reminded him of the fertility goddesses carved on the temple walls in Athens. He wanted to touch her stomach again.
Emily caught his fingers in midair. ‘It’s not your child, Pat.’
The river evaporated and between them there opened a great arid divide. ‘No, of course it isn’t.’
Somehow he got back to his chair behind the editing console without falling. Through what sounded like the buzzing of a bee swarm, Emily told him what had happened. The first week in Mexico she met and befriended an attorney and his barren wife. After knowing them less than a month, she offered to carry a baby for them. She made love to the attorney several times while his wife watched. She left Mexico City for the interior with promises to call them the moment she missed her period.
‘But once I knew, I couldn’t call,’ Emily said.
‘You didn’t tell them? You stole their baby?’
‘It’s my baby,’ she snapped. ‘It’s growing inside of me. Who the father is doesn’t matter.’
An invisible hand crushed Gallagher down. ‘It could have been ours,’ he mumbled. ‘It would have mattered then.’
Emily’s eyes went flat and hard. She fished around in a tan leather pocketbook.
‘No, it wouldn’t, Pat,’ she said, handing him a set of divorce papers. ‘When I first went to Mexico, I used to think that we’d get back together. But the more I thought about you, the more I realized that was not possible.’
‘But why?’
‘Because you don’t believe in the afterlife,’ Emily said.
‘What does that have to do with anything?’ he cried.
‘It’s a circle, Pat,’ Emily replied calmly. ‘To believe in an afterlife, you first have to believe in this life, which takes a belief that love is more powerful than death. At some level you could not get yourself to totally commit and believe in our love, so you destroyed the truest expression of it. Our child.’
She waited for her words to sink in. She rubbed her hands over her belly. ‘This, Pat, could have been your afterlife.’
For the ensuing year Gallagher had stood in a near coma on rivers all over the country, fly casting like some idiot savant, telling himself that Emily was the one who was wrong, that she was the one who bailed out on the marriage and stole some stranger’s sperm for a monstrous exercise in self-gratification.
Now, lying on the rug outside Andie’s closet, he heard Emily’s words echo around him. This, Pat, could have been your afterlife. And for the first time, he admitted Emily might have been right. He didn’t believe in life. He didn’t believe in love, either. How could he? He’d never been taught to love, only to survive by retreating, by keeping life at arm’s length. Gallagher had watched life as if it were an ironic drama unfolding in a fishbowl.
When it counted, when he could have committed himself totally to Emily through their child, he’d pressured her into aborting it and killed the relationship. When it counted, when he could have made some response of love toward Andie on their last night together, he’d retreated inside one of his glass boxes.
‘I had a second chance and I blew it,’ he moaned in disbelief. And then he began to cry. For himself. For Andie. And, yes, for Emily.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gallagher whispered. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
He lay there, helpless and hopeless, for the longest time, wanting the impenetrable black wall to come for him and end the misery.
Then he found himself doing something he’d never done before. He got up on his knees. His hands came together of their own accord to beg the invisible for some sign of hope, some sign of forgiveness. He prayed to something beyond himself that he could change and that Andie might be spared.
Hours later Gallagher stopped, exhausted, convinced that it had been a wasted effort. Seamus had been right all along. There was no God. There was no afterlife. We blip into a cruel existence. We blip out of a cruel existence.
Andie Nightingale would the senselessly at the hands of a madman and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Gallagher punched his hand against the door to the closet until it splintered; then he staggered to her bed in the late-afternoon heat and passed out on top of the quilt.
His sleep was a deep and dreamless suspension in an unwavering blackness. But around midnight, Gallagher stirred up from the abyss into that state between conscious and unconscious. A warm prism of light appeared in that hollow space between his eyes. It rotated, gaseous and ignited, soothing his head as the stroke of a woman might a troubled man. Gallagher was at once awestruck and mother-comforted by its beauty and heard pulsing, like the thump of a stick against a leather drumhead, a thump he recognized as the beat of his own heart. The light slowed and took shape, vague at first, then more certainly into a woman in a buffalo robe with a single eagle’s feather hanging from her hair.
‘Help me, Sarah,’ Gallagher begged.
‘All I wanted was to go home,’ she replied. ‘All anybody wants is to go home. You can take me there. You can find her there. Only you can set us free.’
Many Horses turned and stepped back into the whitest part of the light. It swallowed her the way a snowstorm might a lone traveler on an empty plain, and the light ebbed from brilliance toward the gentle radiance of sunset on a distant horizon.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE WIND CLACKING TREE limbs returned Andie to the edge of consciousness. Her throat burned from the choking. Her lips ached from the gag he’d forced into her mouth, then covered with duct tape. Her feet were swollen from the parachute cord and the tape that bound her ankles. Her wrist throbbed where he’d hit her with the tomahawk.
She heard crows caw in the distance and forced open her eyes. Her vision doubled, fuzzed, then cleared.
Andie lay on her side on a filthy mattress in a cramped, low-ceilinged loft. A shuttered window creaked in the stiff, humid breeze. An old horseshoe was nailed to the wall alongside a faded metal sign advertising Winchester rifle cartridges. At her feet, the top of a wooden ladder jutted over the edge of the loft and she had an ill-formed memory of being carried up it. Clouds of mosquitoes hovered and whined around her in the dusky light. There were blackflies, to
o; they clustered around her eyes and crawled up her nose and bit. She groaned, snuffed and rolled over onto her back, trying to get away from them.
The crown of the mossy-boarded roof was busted through in several places. Thunderclouds rolled overhead.
Andie struggled to sit up against a pole supporting the roof. She arched forward, trying to see over the edge of the loft into the room below. Sheets of indigo cloth had been hung on the windows. Candles burned in the middle of the floor. A narcotic smoke, fungal and acid, wafted in the shadows.
‘It’s summer and you’re back among the living, Persephone,’ a deep voice purred directly over her shoulder.
Andie screamed into the gag. He came crawling around into her line of sight and she screamed again.
His torso was naked, darkly tanned and shaved. There were rings pierced into his nipples. Smears of blood from insect bites dribbled over his sweating skin and rippling muscles. He wore baggy green camouflage pants and that cloth hood that covered his shoulders like an executioner’s cowl. Through the slits in the hood his eyes glistened like mussel shells in a crimson sea. His lips were blue-toned and cruel.
‘So alive,’ he said in a hoarse and indistinguishable voice. ‘But soon I will be reborn, too. I can join you, Angel. I have the squaw’s ceremonies now! The old man never lied to me. Father never lied to me. We’ll finish it now and walk the far bank together, sweet Persephone!’
His hand traveled to his groin. His lips curled into a smile of lust and delight. ‘Remember? You and I, Angel? Just like before? Only this time I’ll dance with ghosts, too. There is another way! I told you it was true.’
Andie shuddered and swallowed. She mustered up a gaze of sympathy and understanding and directed it at the creature. His eyes flared and held hers transfixed. He pressed his hand tightly against his crotch.
With a fragile motion of her chin, she made it known she wanted him to remove the gag. He hesitated, then slid over next to her and she saw the tomahawk up close. He danced it before her, a chipped obsidian blade that had been shoved down into the split leg bone of an animal, then anchored with sinew. A primitive hatchet. An Indian weapon.
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