A Song of Shadows

by John Connolly

  Lange was of sound German stock – incredibly, the old coot’s father was still alive, knocking on the door of his centennial – and ran Boreas as his personal fiefdom. He was a chauvinist and a homophobe, and the best that could be said about him was that he kept the crime rate down, although it hadn’t increased noticeably since his departure, which suggested that Boreas hadn’t exactly been Detroit or New Orleans to begin with. By the end of his reign, it was clear that the townsfolk wanted a change, and Bloom was appointed chief with relatively little fuss. It helped that she was married to a man who hailed originally from Pirna, and – although nothing was ever said to this effect – that she had no children.

  For the most part, the transition to Boreas from Bangor, where Bloom had served before applying for the chief’s job, had been painless, aided by the unanticipated bonus of Lange’s sudden demise, as otherwise he would have been unable to resist sticking his nose in her business, and would have carried himself as the chief-in-exile. Yes, there were some who muttered about the public face of law enforcement being relatively young and, more to the point, female, but Bloom had the right touch, and even those who would happily have erected a statue to Erik Lange in the center of town had gradually warmed to her. A handful of holdouts remained, though, including Lange’s deputy chief, Carl Foster, who threw his toys out of his playpen and left the force when the town passed him over in favor of Bloom. Good riddance to him. It had saved her the trouble of forcing him out.

  She parked her Explorer at the edge of the beach at Mason Point, slipped out of her sneakers and replaced them with the pair of black waterproof boots that she always kept in the trunk. She was supposed to be off duty, but had learned quickly that no chief of police in a small community is ever really off duty. Anyway, this was different. It wasn’t every day that a body washed up on the shores of her town.

  Two uniformed officers were already waiting for her by the water’s edge, along with Dan Rainey, who lived close to the beach and had first seen the body floating in the surf. The officers were both women, and had been hired on Bloom’s watch. Their employment had led, not coincidentally, to a couple of further male retirements and resignations from the department, to go along with those of Lange and Foster, as their aging cronies negotiated settlements with the town and headed off into the sunset. The blatancy of it had irritated Bloom, but she shared her feelings only with her husband. He was an architect with a sideline in designing boats, and exuded the calm of a Buddha, helped by the occasional toke. Sometimes she threatened to arrest him for it, which he found highly amusing. Still, the resulting purge of the department’s deadwood had allowed her to redress the previous gender imbalance (female: 0 percent/ male: 100 percent) while still holding on to a couple of senior male officers who were secretly glad to see the back of Lange, if only because it would enable them to work out their twenty away from his martinet gaze.

  Mary Preston was the younger of the two officers on the beach. She was a big woman in her late twenties, and Bloom wasn’t sure that she would have passed the physical fitness test over in Bangor, which required female recruits of her age to be able to do fifteen push-ups without stopping, thirty-two sit-ups in one minute, and run one and a half miles in fifteen minutes. On the other hand, she was smart, intimidating, loyal, and very, very funny. When Bloom had gently raised the issue of her weight during the interview process, Preston informed her that she had no intention of letting a ‘perp’ – and that was the word she used – get so far away from her that fifteen minutes of jogging would be required to capture him. If speed over distance did become an issue, she said, she’d run him down in her car. If she didn’t have a car, she’d throw her flashlight at him.

  If that failed, she’d just shoot him.

  Bloom hired her on the spot.

  The second officer was Caroline Stynes, who had twelve years under her belt as a sergeant up in Presque Isle. She was a decade older than Preston, and Bloom was grooming her to become deputy chief, just as soon as she could convince the town’s human resources department to come up with an appropriate salary. For now, Stynes had brought her rank with her to Boreas, and was Bloom’s de facto second-in-command.

  ‘What have we got?’ Bloom asked.

  ‘Male,’ said Stynes. ‘Could be in his forties, but it’s hard to say.’

  The body lay facedown on the sand, the retreating tide still lapping at its feet. He looked like he hadn’t been in the sea for too long, although immersion in the cold, deep salt water of the North Atlantic would have inhibited putrefaction for a time. His body also wouldn’t have started to rise until the gases inside decreased its specific gravity, creating enough buoyancy for it to reach the surface and float. In addition, the man was wearing a heavy jacket and a sweater, which would have kept him under the water for longer, even allowing for the action of the gases.

  Bloom pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and gently pushed his hair away from his face. Fish and crustaceans had already been nibbling on the soft tissue, and one eye was gone. She could see some damage to his skull, although it would take an autopsy to determine if it was ante-or postmortem. Corpses in water always float facedown, and the buffeting of the waves, combined with any damage that the body might have sustained upon sinking initially, could well have resulted in abrasions to the head. The lividity to the visible parts of his upper torso was dusky and blotchy from his movement in the water. His right foot was shoeless, although he still wore a striped sock. The remains of his big toe poked from a hole. Something had eaten most of it down to the bone. His left foot had retained its shoe, and the right shoe was attached to it by the laces. So before he’d gone into the water, his shoelaces had been tied together.

  Carefully, Bloom patted the pockets of his garments, looking for some form of ID. She discovered none.

  ‘You thinking a suicide?’ said Stynes.

  Bloom leaned back on her heels. She’d heard of cases in which people had tied their shoelaces together, or bound their legs, before dropping, or shuffling, into the water, just so they could be sure that they wouldn’t start kicking once the panic set in. She had even seen photographs of drowning victims with wire tied around their wrists, leading to an initial assumption that the bodies were put in the water by a third party, only for the autopsy to reveal marks in their mouth where they’d pulled the wire taut with their teeth.

  She examined the man’s fingers. The skin of the pads and the backs of the hands were macerated from his time in the water, but none of the fingernails was missing. As putrefaction developed, the epidermis and nails tended to peel off, but his were still intact.

  ‘I’ll inform the ME and the state police,’ said Bloom. ‘We’ll see if there are any reports of abandoned vehicles, or somebody finding a discarded wallet or ID. In the meantime, we need to get him bagged and off this beach.’

  Now that he was out of the water, decay would start to set in rapidly. It was essential that they secure him in a cooler drawer as soon as possible, in order to facilitate an accurate autopsy. In addition, the discovery of a body inevitably attracted rubberneckers, especially in a small town. Kramer & Sons, the local funeral home, had the contract for dealing with floaters and similar unfortunates in this part of the county. They’d be glad of the work. Despite Boreas’s relatively elderly population, nobody had died in town for a couple of weeks.

  ‘Mary,’ she said, ‘I want you to go up to the road and establish a cordon. No unauthorized vehicles, no unauthorized personnel, and no excuses. Caroline, you stay with the body for now, and take Mr Rainey’s statement. I’m going to call in Mark and Terry to help us do a sweep of the beach while the tide is going out, just in case we can find anything to help us make an identification. All clear?’

  They nodded, then Preston looked past her.

  ‘Pastor’s here,’ she said. ‘And Father Knowles.’

  Bloom turned to see the two men waiting at a polite distance. She could see only one car, though. They must have decided to travel together. Mart
in Luther would have had an embolism.

  ‘Is it okay to come down?’ Pastor Werner called.

  Bloom waved them over. Both men were wearing clerical collars. She wondered if they’d put them on specially. Bloom wasn’t religious, but she maintained good relations with both Werner and Father Knowles, the parish priest of Holy Mother. He was a tiny, energetic man, whose enthusiasm for everything sometimes wearied Bloom. She got on better with the Lutheran Werner, who was more laid back and laconic. He probably had six inches on Knowles, and the smaller cleric usually deferred to Werner in community matters, for Werner’s father had been pastor before him, while Knowles was only in his second year at Holy Mother.

  ‘We heard about it in town,’ said Father Knowles. ‘It’s no one local, is it?’

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ said Bloom.

  The two men looked past her at the face of the dead man, and winced at the sight of him.

  ‘I don’t recognize him,’ said Knowles, ‘but then, he’s been in the water. Do you, Axel?’

  Werner shook his head. ‘No, he’s not familiar.’

  ‘Do you mind if I say a prayer for him?’ Knowles asked Bloom.

  Bloom told him that she didn’t mind at all. It wasn’t like it would hurt the dead man. ‘Just don’t touch the body, okay?’

  Knowles produced a rosary from his pocket and knelt by the corpse. Werner bowed his head, but said nothing. Bloom recalled that there was something in Lutheranism about not praying for the dead. Preston, who was Catholic, joined her hands, and crossed herself when Knowles was finished.

  Bloom walked with Knowles and Werner back to the parking lot, and watched them leave. She made calls to the Office of the Medical Examiner in Augusta, and the state police in Bangor, as well as to the Washington County Sheriff’s Department in Machias. Finally she spoke with Lloyd Kramer and arranged to have the body bagged and put on ice until the ME determined how it should be handled.

  She then decided to return home and change into her uniform. It always paid to look official in these situations. She turned the Explorer and headed for the main road. The gradient upward from the beach was comparatively gentle, and the entire strand was visible to passing traffic. As she prepared to make the turn, only one car was approaching, heading north to town: a Mustang that slowed almost to a stop as it passed her. She caught a glimpse of the driver as he glanced first at her, then at the figures on the sand: Rainey and Stynes by the body, and Preston trudging back to her vehicle. He was wearing sunglasses, but Bloom knew him by his car.

  The detective, Parker.

  She had spoken with him only once, when she spotted him at Hayman’s General Store buying bread and milk. She’d introduced herself, and asked how he was settling in, as much to be neighborly as anything else. He’d seemed pleasant, if distant. She knew that he sometimes liked reading the newspaper in the Moosebreath Coffee House, although Bobby Soames had told her that he preferred the little seating area at the back of Olesens Books & Cards. Soames fretted a lot about Parker. He appeared to be under the impression that a gunfight could break out at any moment up in Green Heron Bay. Parker also ate at the Brickhouse a couple of evenings a week, although he usually didn’t drink anything stronger than a soda. Mostly, from what she heard, he just walked on the beach by his house, and traveled twice weekly to the Brook House Clinic for physiotherapy.

  Now she nodded at him, and he nodded back. He took one more look at the activity on the beach, and drove on. She stayed behind him through town until he pulled up outside Olesens. In her rearview mirror, she watched him take a copy of the New York Times from the rack by the door and head inside. Guess it’s true then, she thought. She was curious about him. His presence in Boreas was incongruous, given his reputation. It was like having a grenade rolling around, one you had been assured was defused but hadn’t had time to check out for yourself.

  But she had other concerns today. She thought that she could smell the dead man on the plastic gloves she had discarded on the floor of her vehicle, or maybe she was just imagining it. When she pulled into her driveway, she took a pick-up bag from the supply that she kept on hand for the needs of her black Lab, Jodie, used it to dispose of the gloves, and tied the bag. Ron, her husband, wasn’t home. He was working on a kitchen redesign in Eastport, and would be gone for most of the day. She let Jodie run in the backyard while she changed, then called her back inside and returned to the Explorer. Jodie’s nose was pressed against the glass above the front door as she pulled away, a vision of abandonment. Bloom tried not to look. Sometimes, she was grateful that she’d never had children. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever have been able to leave the house.

  6

  Olesens – which Larraine Olesen always felt should more correctly have been ‘Olesen’s’, or even ‘Olesens’’ on the sign, since she and her brother Greg were joint owners – had been a fixture in Boreas since the midfifties, when Larraine and Greg’s parents opened the store while still in their twenties. They’d continued to run it until the turn of the century, at which point they decided that enough was enough, and it was time for younger blood to take over. Neither of their children was married. Greg was briefly engaged to a local woman, but the relationship had never really taken, while Larraine – well, deep down Larraine probably preferred the company of women, but was too shy and too Lutheran to do anything about it. She wasn’t bitter or unhappy, just a little lonely, but she loved her brother, and she loved books, and thus had found a measure of contentment in life.

  Like independent bookstores everywhere, Olesens had struggled to adapt to the new age of bookselling. A family argument had erupted between the generations when Larraine and Greg began selling ‘gently used’ books alongside new stock, which their parents regarded as a dangerous step down the slope toward not selling any books at all. But Greg had a good eye not just for a bargain, but for rare first editions, and the store’s Internet presence, along with a nice sideline in greeting cards, wrapping paper, and other materials that generated the kind of markup that books could only dream of, was keeping the store not only in business, but in profit. It had been Larraine’s decision to add the little coffee bar at the back of the store. It faced out over Clark’s Stream, which ran through the town, and the somewhat unimaginatively named Clark’s Bridge, a pretty thing of stone and moss that looked as though it came from many centuries past, but was not much older than the store itself. The coffee bar sold pastries and cookies baked by Mrs Olesen, and decent coffee. It turned out that no small number of folk, both tourists and local, enjoyed the ambience of the Nook, as it was called, and the markup on coffee put even greeting cards to shame. There had been some tension initially between the Olesens and Rob Hallinan, owner of the Moosebreath Coffee House further north on Bay, but it turned out that Boreas had just about enough customers for both of them, and more than enough in summer.

  Charlie Parker had started coming in shortly after his arrival in town, because Olesens prided itself on carrying enough copies of the New York and Boston papers to satisfy demand year-round. The Olesens knew who he was almost as soon as he arrived, of course. Most everybody in town who was worth a damn had an early inkling of the detective’s presence out on Green Heron Bay, and without exception they had become strangely protective of him. Even Chief Bloom had expressed surprise at how little muttering there had been, given that people in Boreas complained if the Brickhouse changed one of its draft beer taps, even if they never drank beer, and had debated for weeks about repainting the town’s welcome sign in a softer shade of white. Perhaps it was something to do with his past: he was a man who had lost a wife and child, and had suffered grievous injury just for doing a job which, as far as anyone could tell, largely involved putting his mark on the kind of men and women without whom the world was a much better place. The shooting made him one of theirs, and the town had quietly closed ranks around him.

  In the beginning Larraine and Greg kept their distance, allowing him his space to drink, and read newspapers, books
and magazines, all of them bought at Olesens, with none of the books ever returned for a fifty percent trade-in, even though a big sign at the counter invited customers to do just that. But slowly they had tested the waters with him and found him to be gently, slyly funny, and aware of the strangeness of his situation in the town. Greg, in particular, got along well with him, and Greg was the archetypal dysfunctional independent bookseller. He gave the impression that he disapproved of most of his customers’ book choices – which he did – and resented selling copies of books that he loved – also true – either because he wasn’t sure that the buyer was worthy of the book or, in the case of the rarer editions, because he hated seeing them leave the store. The locals had become used to his ways, while Larraine tended to deal with the tourists. Just as there were broadcasters with faces made for radio, so too there were booksellers with attitudes designed for the Internet age, which limited the possible misunderstandings that might arise from any personal contact.

  Now, while Parker sipped his Americano and flipped through the Arts section of the New York Times, Greg approached him, carrying in the crook of his arm three hefty matching volumes – a psychiatric analysis of marital and sexual humor which he felt certain he could sell at a considerable profit to some visiting shrink during the summer, assuming he could even bring himself to part with them when the time came.

  Parker continued to read his paper. He did not look up.

  ‘You ignoring me?’ said Greg.

  ‘Is it working?’

  ‘No. You ever hear of a British band called the Smiths?’

  ‘Yes, but you’re too old for them.’

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Greg, now doing his best to ignore Parker’s contribution to the conversation in turn, ‘their lead singer, Morrison—’

  ‘Morrissey.’

  ‘—Morrissey, has a song called “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get”. I’m considering adopting it as a motto.’