Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  Even Jennings had to agree. ‘Shit, Daryl, you should have left him as he was, then let the wardens go and get him.’

  ‘I couldn’t leave him out there,’ said Daryl. ‘It weren’t right.’

  ‘Maybe Daryl’s right. If it snows, and it will, we could have lost him until the spring,’ said Ressler. ‘Daryl says he found the body at Island Pond, wrapped it in the tarp and hauled it back ten miles to his truck with his ski-doo. Island Pond’s quite a ways from here and, according to Daryl, the road already turns into one big snowdrift way before you reach the pond.’

  I glanced at Daryl with respect; there weren’t many men who’d haul the body of a stranger for miles. ‘No way anyone can head out there in the dark, assuming we could even find the place,’ concluded Jennings. ‘Anyway, this is a matter for the wardens, maybe the sheriffs department, but not us. We’ll arrange to have him taken to Augusta in the morning, let the ME take a look at him.’

  I looked up, beyond the trees and into the black night sky. There was a sense of heaviness, as of a weight above us about to fall. Ressler followed my gaze.

  ‘Like I said, Daryl was right. Snow’s coming.’

  Jennings gave Ressler a look that said he didn’t want any more details of the discovery spoken of in front of Daryl and, especially, me. He slapped his hands together sharply. ‘OK, let’s go.’ He leaned into the bed of the truck and covered Gary Chute’s body with the tarp, using pieces of scrap metal, a wheel iron and the butt of a shotgun to hold it in place. He crooked a finger at the patrolman.

  ‘Stevie, you ride in the bed here, make sure that tarp doesn’t come off’ Stevie, who looked about eleven, shook his head unhappily then climbed carefully into the truck, squatting down beside the body. Ressler went back to his car, leaving only Jennings and me.

  ‘I’m sure we all appreciate your assistance, Parker.’

  ‘Funny, but I don’t think you mean that.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t. Stay out of my way, and out of my business. I don’t want to have to tell you that again.’ He tapped me once on the chest with a gloved finger, then turned and walked away. The cars started almost in unison and formed a convoy with the truck – one ahead, one behind – as Gary Chute was brought back to Dark Hollow.

  Leaves and branches, as well as snow, had covered Chute’s body, according to Daryl. If his death was accidental, and Daryl had taken the money from his wallet, then that didn’t make too much sense. The trees were bare, and it had been snowing pretty regularly over the last week or so. Snow would have covered the body, but not leaves and branches. Their presence indicated that someone could have been trying to hide Gary Chute’s body.

  I walked back to my car and thought of what I had seen in the flashlight’s glow: red marks on the dead man’s wrists. Those marks weren’t made by a fall, or by animals, or frost.

  They were rope burns.

  When I got back to the motel, Angel and Louis were gone. There was a note under my door, written in Angel’s strangely neat hand, telling me that they had gone to the diner and would see me there. I didn’t follow them. Instead, I went down to the motel reception desk, filled two foam containers with coffee and returned to my room.

  Chute’s death continued to bother me. It was unfortunate that it had been Daryl who found the body, even if he had acted with the best of intentions. Chute’s truck could probably have served as a rough marker for the crime scene but now its integrity had been fatally compromised by Daryl’s removal of the body.

  Maybe it was nothing, but on a map I marked roughly where Gary Chute’s body had been found at Island Pond. Island Pond was to the north-east of Dark Hollow. The only way to reach that area was along a private road, which required a permit for use. If someone had killed Gary Chute, they’d have to have taken that road to get to him, following him into the wilderness. The other possibility was that whoever killed him was in the wilderness already, waiting for him. Or . . .

  Or maybe Chute was unlucky enough to see someone, or something, that he shouldn’t have. Maybe whoever killed him didn’t go into the wilderness after him, but was coming back out again. And, if that was the case, then the first place that person would arrive at was Dark Hollow.

  But this was all speculation. I needed to get my thoughts in order. On a page of my notebook, I noted all that had happened since the night that Billy Purdue had stuck his knife in my cheek. Where there were links, I formed dotted lines between the names. Most of them came back to Billy Purdue, except Ellen Cole’s disappearance and the death of Gary Chute.

  And in the centre of the list was a white space, empty and clean as new-fallen snow. The other names and incidents circled around it, like planets around a sun. I felt the old instinct, the desire to impose some pattern on incidents that I did not yet fully understand, some form of explanation that might begin to lead me to an ultimate truth. When I was a detective in New York, dealing with the deaths of those whom I had not known, with whom I had no direct connection, to whom I had no duty beyond that of the policeman whose task it is to find out what happened and to ensure that someone answers for the crime, I would follow the threads of the investigation as I had laid them out and when they led nowhere, or proved simply to be false assumptions, I would shrug and return to the core to follow another thread. I was prepared to make mistakes in the hope that I would eventually find something that was not an error.

  That luxury, the luxury of detachment, was taken away from me when Susan and Jennifer died. Now they all mattered, all of the lost, all of the gone, but Ellen Cole mattered more than most. If she was in trouble, then there was no room for error, no time to make mistakes in the hope that they would lead to some final reckoning. Neither could I forget Rita Ferris and her son, and at the thought of her I looked instinctively over my shoulder and towards the dark rectangle of the window, and I recalled a weight on my shoulder, cold but not unyielding, the touch of a familiar hand.

  There was too much happening, too many deaths revolving around the white space at the centre of the page. And in that space, I put a question mark, dotted it carefully, then extended the dots down to the bottom of the page.

  And there I wrote the name ‘Caleb Kyle’.

  I should have gone out to eat then. I should have found Angel and Louis and gone to a bar where I could have watched them drink and flirt oddly with each other. I might even have had a drink, just one drink . . . Women would have gone by, swaying gently as the alcohol took hold of their bodies and minds. Perhaps one of them might have smiled at me, and I might have smiled back and felt the spark that ignites when a beautiful woman focuses her attention on a man. I could have had another drink, then another, and soon I would have forgotten everything and descended into oblivion forever.

  The anniversary was approaching. I was aware of it as a dark cloud on the horizon, moving inexorably to engulf me in memories of loss and pain. I wanted normality, yet it continued to hang beyond my reach. I wasn’t even sure why I had gone to Rachel’s office, except that I knew that I wanted to be with her even though my feelings for her made me feel sick and guilty, as if I were somehow betraying Susan’s memory. With these thoughts, after all that had happened over the past few days, and after allowing my mind to explore the nature of the killings that had occurred in both the recent and distant pasts, I should not have remained alone.

  Tired and so hungry that my appetite had faded entirely away to be replaced by a deeper, gnawing unease, I undressed and climbed into my bed, pulling the sheets over my head and wondering how long it would take me to fall asleep. Just long enough, it emerged, to get that thought out.

  I awoke to a noise, and a faint, unpleasant odour that took me a few moments to identify. It was the smell of rotting vegetation, of leaves and mulch and standing water. I rose from my pillow and wiped the sleep from my eyes, my nose wrinkling as the smell of decay grew stronger. There was a clock-radio on the nightstand – the time read 12.33 a.m. – and I checked it in case the alarm might somehow have switched its
elf on during the night, but the radio was silent. I looked around the room, conscious now of a strangeness to the light, a tinge of unfamiliar colour that should not have been present.

  There was singing coming from my bathroom.

  It was low but sweet, the sound of two voices combining to sing the same song, a song that sounded like a nursery rhyme, the words muffled by the closed bathroom door.

  And from beneath the door, a green light seeped, its form rippling across the cheap carpet. I pushed back the covers and stood naked on the floor, but felt no cold, no chill, and began to walk towards the bathroom. As I did so, the smell grew stronger. I could feel it adhering to my skin and hair, as if I was bathing in its source. The singing rose in volume, the words now clear, the same three syllables repeated over and over again in high, girlish tones.

  Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle

  I was almost at the point where the tendrils of light from beneath the door reached their farthest extension. From behind the door came the sound of water softly lapping.

  Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle

  I stood for a second at the periphery of the green light, then placed one bare foot in its pool.

  The singing stopped as soon as my foot touched the floor, but the light remained, moving slowly, viscously, across my bare toes. I reached forward and carefully turned the handle of the door. I pulled it open and stepped onto the tiles.

  The room was empty. There were only the white surfaces, the neat pile of towels above the toilet, the sink with its low-grade soaps still wrapped, the glasses with their paper covers, the flower-speckled curtain on the bath pulled almost completely across . . .

  The light came from the behind the curtain, a sickly, green glow that shone with only a vestige of the power of its original source, as if it had fought its way through layers and layers of obstacles to offer what little illumination it could. And in the quiet of the room, broken only by the soft lapping of water from behind the curtain, it seemed as if something held its breath. I heard a soft giggle, smothered by a hand, the laugh echoed by another, and the water behind the curtain lapped more loudly.

  I reached out a hand, gripped the plastic and began to pull it quickly across. There was some resistance, but I continued to open the curtain until the interior of the bath was completely exposed.

  The water was full of leaves, so many that they reached up to the faucets. They were green and red, brown and yellow, black and gold. There was aspen and birch, cedar and cherry, maple and basswood, beech and fir, their shapes twisted and overlapping, the ferocity of their decay polluting the water and creating a stench that was almost visible as it rose.

  A shape moved beneath the leaves, and bubbles broke upwards. The vegetation separated and something white began to rise to the surface, a long, slow ascent as if the water was far deeper than it could possibly be. As it neared, it seemed to separate into two figures, their hands held as they rose, their long hair spreading and flowing as they came, their mouths open, their eyes blind.

  I let the curtain fall and tried to move, but the tiles betrayed me, just as they had betrayed me on the day that I first found the little girls. And as I fell, their shades moved behind the curtain and I backed away on my hands and heels, my fingers and toes scrabbling for purchase until I awoke once again, the sheets in a pile at the end of the bed, the mattress exposed and a bloody hole in its fabric where I had torn through it with my nails.

  A hammering came at the door.

  ‘Bird! Bird!’ It was Louis’s voice.

  I crawled from my bed and realised I was shivering uncontrollably. I struggled with the chain on the door, my fingers fumbling at the catch, and then, at last, it was open and Louis was standing there before me in a pair of grey sweatpants and a white T-shirt, his gun in his hand.

  ‘Bird?’ he repeated. There was concern in his eyes, and a kind of love. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Something bubbled in my throat, and I tasted bile and coffee.

  ‘I see them,’ I said. ‘I see them all.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  I sat on the edge of my bed, my head in my hands, and waited while Louis went to the office and poured two cups of coffee from the eternally brewing pot. As he passed by his own room I heard him exchange words with Angel, although he was still alone when he closed the door behind him, shutting out the cold night air. He handed me the foam cup, and I thanked him before sipping from it silently. From outside came the soft tapping of snow falling on my window. He didn’t talk for a time, and I felt him considering something in his mind.

  ‘I ever tell you about my Grandma Lucy?’ he said at last.

  I looked at him in surprise. ‘Louis, I don’t even know your surname,’ I replied.

  He smiled dimly, as if it were all he could do to recollect what it might have been himself. ‘Anyways,’ he continued, and the smile faded, ‘Lucy, she was my gran’momma, my mamma’s momma, not much older than I am now. She was a beautiful woman: tall, skin like day fading into night. She wore her hair down, always. I never recall her wearing it no other way but down, it tumbling over her shoulders in dark curls. She lived with us until the day she died, and she died young. The pneumonia took her, and she faded away in shakes and sweats.

  ‘There was a man who lived in the town, and his name was Errol Rich. Ever since I knew him, he just wasn’t a man to turn the other cheek. When you were black, and you lived in that kind of town, that’s the first thing you learned. You always, always, turned the other cheek, ‘cause if you didn’t, weren’t no white sheriff, no white jury, no bunch of redneck assholes with ropes ready to tie you to the axle of a truck and drag you along dirt roads till your skin came off, weren’t none of them going to see it no other way but a nigger gettin’ above himself, and settin’ a bad example to all the other niggers, maybe gettin’ them all riled up so’s that white folks with better things to do would have to go out some dark night and teach them all a lesson. Put some manners on them, maybe.

  ‘But Errol, he didn’t see things that way. He was a huge mother. He walked down the street and the sun wasn’t big enough to shine around his shoulders. He fixed things – engines, mowers, anything that had a moving part and the hand of man could find a way to save. Lived in a big shack out on one of the old county roads, ‘long with his momma and his sisters, and he looked them white boys in the eye, and he knew they was afraid.

  ‘Except, this one time, he was driving by a bar out by Route 5 and he heard someone call out “Hey, Nigger!” and the cracked old windshield of his truck, it just exploded in. They threw a big old bottle through it, full of all the piss those assholes could work up between ’em. And Errol, he pulled over, and he sat there for a time, covered in blood and glass and piss, then he climbed out of the cab, took him a length of timber maybe three feet long from the bed of his truck, and he walked over to where them good ol’ boys were sitting on the stoop. There was four of ‘em, including the owner, a pig of a man called Little Tom Rudge, and he could see them freeze up as he came.

  ‘“Who threw that?” says Errol. “You throw that, Little Tom? ’Cos if you did, you better tell me now, else I’m gonna burn your shit-heap down to the ground.”

  ‘But nobody answered. Them boys, they was just struck dumb. Even together in a bunch and all liquored up, they knew better than to mess with Errol. And Errol, he just looked at them for a time, then he spat on the ground and he took that length of timber and threw it through the window of the bar, and Little Tom, there wasn’t nothing he could do. Least of all, not then.

  ‘They came for him the next night, three truckloads of ’em. They took him in front of his momma and his sisters and brought him to a place called Ada’s Field, where there was a chestnut tree that was maybe a century old. And when they got there, half the town was waitin’ for ’em. There was women there, even some of the older children. Folks ate chicken and biscuits, and drank soda pop from glass bottles, and talked about the weather, and the coming harvest, and maybe the baseball season, like they was at
the county fair and they was waitin’ for the show to start. All told, there was more than a hundred people there, sittin’ on the hoods of their cars, waitin’.

  ‘And when Errol came, his legs and hands were tied and they hauled him up onto the roof of an old Lincoln that was parked under the tree. And they put a rope around his neck, and tightened it. Then someone came up and poured a can of gasoline over him, and Errol looked up, and he spoke the only words he said since they took him, and the only words he would ever say again on this earth.

  ‘“Don’t burn me”, he said. He wasn’t asking them to spare him, or not to hang him. He wasn’t afraid of that. But he didn’t want to burn. Then I guess maybe he looked up into their eyes and saw that what was to be would be, and he bowed his head and he started to pray.

  ‘Well, they tightened the rope around his neck and they pulled it so that Errol was balancing on the tips of his toes on the roof of the car, and then the car started and Errol hung in the air, twisting and thrashing. And someone came forward with a burning torch in his hand and they burned Errol Rich as he hung, and those people, they listened to him scream until his lungs burned and he couldn’t scream no more. And then he died.

  ‘That was at ten after nine, on a July night, maybe three miles away from our house, right on the other side of town. And at ten after nine, my Grandma Lucy, she rose from her chair by the radio. I was sittin’ at her feet. The others, they was in the kitchen or in bed asleep, but I was still with her. Grandma Lucy, she walked to the door and stepped out into the night, wearin’ nothin’ but her nightdress and a shawl, and she looked out into the woods. I followed her, and I said: “Miss Lucy, what’s the matter?” but she didn’t say nothin’, just kept on walkin’ until she was about ten feet away from the edge of the trees, and there she stopped.

  ‘And out in the darkness, among the trees, there was a light. It didn’t look like no more than a patch of moonlight but, when I tried to find it, there was no moon, and the rest of the woods was dark.