A Song of Shadows

by John Connolly

  ‘Does that mean if I talk to you, you’ll go away?’

  ‘No, that’ll just encourage me too.’

  He shifted the books to his other arm.

  ‘You hear they found a body out at Mason Point?’

  ‘Yeah, I drove by the beach on my way back into town.’ Parker looked up at Greg for the first time. ‘It seemed like Chief Bloom had only just got out there. News travels fast.’

  ‘In this place? Fast doesn’t cover it. There are people here who probably knew the guy was dead before he did.’

  Greg thought about what he’d just said.

  ‘I didn’t mean that to sound, you know, like it sounded,’ he said. ‘Unless someone here killed him, but that doesn’t seem likely.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Tides. I’d say he went into the water farther south.’

  Parker returned to his paper.

  ‘Well, it looks like Bloom has it all in hand.’

  ‘She’s good. We’re lucky to have her.’

  Greg remained hovering, his shadow falling slightly over the table.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you miss it? You know, what you used to do. What you still do, I guess, assuming you’ll go back to it. If you do.’

  ‘No.’

  Sometimes.

  Yes.

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’ll get back to work.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Offer you a refill?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m good.’

  Greg returned to the office that lay between the Nook and the store itself. Larraine left the register to step inside and kick him forcefully on the shin.

  ‘Can’t you leave the man in peace for five minutes?’

  Greg rubbed his shin to ease the pain. Sometimes, when it came to his older sister, he still felt like he was eight years old.

  ‘It just came out,’ he said. ‘Ouch. I think you broke the skin.’

  ‘I’ll break your skull next time.’

  ‘You almost made me drop the books.’

  ‘You’re an idiot. You have waffles for brains. Go make yourself useful and sell something.’

  Greg sat down at his desk, still muttering about his injury. Larraine watched the detective. He had put down his newspaper and was staring out the window at the stream. She could see the reflection of his face in the glass. She thought that, if she were ever to be attracted to a man, it might be one like him. He wasn’t handsome, not exactly, but he had depths. What swam through them, though, she could not tell.

  7

  Later that afternoon, out at Green Heron Bay, Amanda Winter opened the front door of their house to find an envelope lying on the step. Her mother had announced that she was keeping her out of school for the rest of the week. Amanda suffered from severe asthma, on top of her other problems. Her breathing had been especially bad the previous night, and she still hadn’t been quite right that morning. She also seemed to be coming down with a cold, so it made sense to err on the side of caution.

  Although the sea air was good for her, she was bored of the house. She had wrapped herself up warmly before going out for a walk along the strand. Now the envelope stopped her in her tracks. It was addressed to her mother in black block capitals, and felt heavy. It didn’t have a stamp on it, which meant that someone must have dropped it off in person.

  ‘Mom,’ she called. ‘There’s mail for you.’

  Ruth Winter emerged from the dining room, where she had set up a small office area for herself. She worked as an independent financial planner and adviser, helping people with everything from cash flow and budgeting to investments and house purchases. Being self-employed had made the move to Boreas easier, even if her daughter still didn’t understand the reasons for it. With luck, she never would.

  Ruth took the envelope. There was something small but bulky inside.

  ‘Thanks, honey,’ she said. ‘Don’t go too far.’

  ‘Yes, Mom.’

  ‘And keep your coat buttoned.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you have your inhaler, just in case?’

  Amanda reached into her pocket and waved the device.

  ‘Good girl.’

  She watched her daughter head out to the stones and sand, her hands buried in her pockets, her head up to smell the air, her chest expanding to take in almost comically exaggerated breaths, or as deep as her blocked airways would allow.

  Ruth opened the envelope. Inside was a man’s wallet. She removed the driver’s license from it and read the name: Bruno Perlman. A yellow Post-it note, folded in half, was stuck to the interior of the wallet. She opened it up. In the same block capitals as the name on the envelope, it read

  KEEP QUIET

  She walked quickly to the bathroom and was violently ill.

  For the rest of the day, the talk in Boreas was only of the body on the beach. Preliminary arrangements were made to transport it to Augusta for autopsy, although the Maine Medical Examiner’s office had indicated that it might be some days before they could get to it, and hence there was no particular urgency, so the body stayed at Kramer & Sons. A description was given to the newspaper and the TV news shows, just in case anyone could come forward to help with identification.

  And the one who knew the truth watched it all, and realized that he would have to act.

  8

  The house stood on the southern shore of Seven Stones Lake, a body of water southwest of Machias. It was an unspectacular family dwelling with a view of the water partially obscured by pine trees, and a two-car garage, half-filled with the accumulated junk of a family with three teenage children, and otherwise occupied by a battered Mitsubishi Lancer station wagon. Dream catchers, made by a Penobscot craftsman using twigs and natural feathers, were visible in two of the upper windows.

  Through the yard, its grass recently mown, its borders trimmed. Past the rose bushes, past the herb garden. Up the porch steps, taking in the paintwork that remained just about presentable for another year. Into the living room.

  Four bodies lay side by side on the floor: a father, a mother, and two daughters aged thirteen and fifteen. The radio played, and the table was laid for breakfast. A newspaper lay open, and had anyone been left alive to read it, they might eventually have come to an article below the fold about a body washed ashore at Boreas.

  The parents had been shot first – their blood was on the kitchen floor – and then moved into place on the carpet. The two girls had been killed next, one on the stairs, the other in the bathroom, and then carried down to the living room to lie beside their parents.

  One child remained missing. He was outside, watching the house. His name was Oran Wilde, and his parents and teachers sometimes despaired of him. He was seventeen, and among his high school peers had not-so-secretly been voted ‘Person Most Likely to Die a Virgin.’ He had few friends, but he wasn’t a bad kid. He was just angry and confused and solitary. He listened to music of which no one else had heard, read thousand-page fantasy novels, and liked most kinds of clothing as long as they were black. His bedroom window, unlike those of his younger sisters, did not contain a dream catcher.

  Oran should already have been at school along with his sisters, even if they always tried their best in public to pretend that they were not related to him. His father should have been behind his desk at the plumbing and bath supply company that he owned. His mother should have been doing whatever it was his mother did when her husband and children were not around. Oran sometimes wondered what that might be, but never asked. His job in life was to show as little interest as possible in his parents and their movements, in the hope that his lack of curiosity about them might be reciprocated, although it never was. They persisted in caring, which frustrated Oran greatly.

  Somewhere in the house, a telephone rang. The sound stopped, only to be replaced by his mother’s cellphone trilling. That was followed by the c
avalry charge ringtone of his father’s phone. It was probably the school, Oran figured. Mrs Prescott, the school secretary, was responsible for tracking down students suspected of truancy. Not that Oran had ever skipped school: it wasn’t in his nature. By doing so he would have drawn attention to himself, and Oran, as has already been established, preferred to fly under the radar. He just kept his head down and tried to avoid getting the shit kicked out of him. He hated high school. He couldn’t countenance the possibility that there were people in the world who looked back on their schooldays only with fondness; as the best time of their lives. How bad could your life be, Oran wondered, if your days in high school represented the best of it? He had always imagined that the happiest moment of his life would involve leaving his school behind, and perhaps blowing it up immediately after.

  Would Mrs Prescott call the police if she got no answer? Maybe. Clare and Briony, Oran’s sisters, were the stars of their respective years. Everyone liked them, aside from a handful of bitches. The sisters wore their popularity easily, and did their best not to look down on anyone, their brother excepted. Even Oran liked them, and he thought that they secretly liked him too. They just put a lot of effort into not showing it. Their parents, Michael and Ella, turned up for school concerts, and basketball and field hockey games. They were a pretty regular family, Oran apart – and, truth be told, Oran was pretty regular too, despite appearances to the contrary. In a bigger high school he would probably have blended in better, or found more young people like himself. Tecopee Fields High was simply too small to allow the Oran Wildes of this world to grow and prosper, or even just to hide.

  The first of the flames flickered in the hallway, then, with startling rapidity, spread to the living room and raced up the stairs. In less than a minute, Oran thought that he could smell his family burning. He was shocked at how quickly the house ignited. He saw birds flying away in panic. The wind shifted, blowing some of the smoke back at him. His eyes watered. He tried not to breathe in the fumes, and the odor of roasting flesh that underpinned them. He was crying now, sobbing and retching, speaking the names of his mother and father and sisters in a language that could not be understood, the words emerging only as muffled sounds, as though in dying their identities had been lost and their names could no longer be spoken clearly, the flames stealing them away letter by letter along with their skin and flesh, turning them to black spirals that rose in the late morning sky and dissipated against the clear blue of a fall day. He was sorry, so sorry. He wanted to tell them that. He wanted them to know that he loved them, and had always loved them. He just couldn’t say it, but he would have done so, eventually. He would have made something of himself too. He was writing a book. It wasn’t bad, and it would get better. He had planned to show it to them, once he’d gotten a little more done. He’d already won an essay competition – so it was a religious essay competition, which was a bit embarrassing, but it had still earned him $100 as first prize, which wasn’t chump change – and he’d seen how happy it had made his mom and dad, even if he’d been too embarrassed and tied up in his own world to enjoy their pride in his achievements. He’d wanted to make them prouder still, but now that would never happen.

  His home was a fiery specter of itself, its shape visible only as yellows and oranges and, here and there, spikes of angry red. He heard an explosion deep inside, and the frame seemed to shudder in shock.

  And then the trunk of the car closed upon him, and there was only darkness.

  9

  Amanda was playing by the shoreline. She was trying to master the art of skimming stones, but any that she threw simply sank. Her mother couldn’t skim stones either, so there was no point in asking her for advice. It was at times like this that Amanda wished her father were around. Actually, she often wished for her father’s presence, if only so that she could see him in the flesh, and ask him why he had rejected her mother and herself, and if he was bad, and, if not, what he had done to get himself killed. (But she felt that it would also be useful to consult him briefly about the art of skimming stones, and a couple of other small matters on which it might be productive to have a male perspective.)

  Her mother had shown Amanda a picture of the two of them together. Amanda thought that her father looked very handsome, but also kind of rough, like some of the older high school boys. Beside him, her mother held on tight to his waist, smiling prettily. Seeing them in the same photo was like glimpsing her standing with a ghost.

  She didn’t spot Mr Parker until he had passed behind her. The sight of him brought back the memory of her dream, and the girl’s face that she had almost glimpsed, traces of red about to be further exposed before Amanda awoke. It was just a dream, of course: of that she was reasonably certain. She couldn’t properly explain the sand in her bed, though. She supposed that it might have lodged between her toes unnoticed that day, but it hardly seemed likely. Her toes weren’t webbed, so there was a limit to the amount of sand that could be stored between them. The other possibility was that she had somehow walked in her sleep, which worried her a lot. She didn’t like to think of her sleeping self wandering down to the sea and into the waves to be lost forever, or at least until the tide found a way to wash her body back to shore again. The thought of her final footsteps frozen in the sand, of her mother crying at the realization of what had befallen her daughter, made her sad, but in an interesting way, like a tragic heroine in a book or movie.

  Perhaps that image had come to her because of the body on the beach at Mason Point. The day before, she and her mother had headed out for a late breakfast at Muriel’s, the big old diner that lay halfway between Boreas and Pirna. Amanda liked Muriel’s because the pancakes were great, and the little jukeboxes at the tables still worked. On the way there, they had witnessed the activity down at Mason Point, and her mother had stopped to ask one of the officers on duty if there had been some kind of accident. That was when they found out about the body, and although Amanda still ate her pancakes later, they didn’t taste quite as good as usual. Drowning sounded to her like a terrible way to die. Drowning, or burning: both of those were very bad. Then, later, she’d brought her mother the envelope that she’d found on the doorstep, and her mother had been very quiet for the rest of the evening, and the toilet had smelled of vomit.

  Now here was Mr Parker, walking more slowly than he had the last time, when she had watched him from her window. His face looked gray, and Amanda thought that she could see beads of sweat blistering on his skin even though a breeze was blowing and it wasn’t hot. She called out a greeting, but he didn’t hear. He just stared fixedly ahead, placing one foot slowly and deliberately in front of the other. He didn’t have his stick with him today. Either he had forgotten it, which didn’t seem likely, or he was trying to make do without it. She saw the ribbon on the bag of stones fluttering in the wind, and Mr Parker altered his direction to move toward it. He was almost within touching distance of it when he stopped and swayed, then slowly collapsed to the sand, his knees folding beneath him, so that he came to rest like a man saying his bedtime prayers.

  Amanda ran to him. For a moment it looked as though he would fall flat on his face, but he managed to stay upright and instead slumped back, the backs of his thighs against his calf muscles, his hands by his sides, the palms raised upwards. Amanda reached him, but did not touch him. She wasn’t sure what to do. Should she run back to her mother to get help? But that would mean leaving Mr Parker alone. Should she try to assist him? Yes, it was probably the best thing, although she figured that it would possibly break her mother’s rule about having anything to do with strangers. But what else could she do? Still, she held back, uncertain.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked, even though it was clear that he wasn’t.

  He turned his head in her direction, only noticing her now that she had spoken.

  ‘I just need … to catch my breath.’

  He was breathing shallowly, and she could see the pain in his face.

  ‘Do you want me to get m
y mom?’

  ‘No. I’ll be fine in a moment.’

  She knelt by him. She didn’t know what else to do, so she put her right hand on his shoulder and rubbed gently. She had seen adults do this to each other when one of them was sad or in pain, although when she was sad or in pain, she preferred a hug. She didn’t think it would be appropriate to hug Mr Parker. That would certainly have broken her mother’s rule.

  ‘I’m going to get up now,’ he said at last.

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  She wasn’t sure that she could, but it was only right to offer. She held his right arm as he used his left to lever himself up. His right hand came to rest on her right shoulder, and she took some of his weight as he stood. He swayed again when he was upright, but he didn’t fall. She saw him looking at the red ribbon in the sand, and she knew what he was thinking.

  ‘I’ll walk to it with you, if you like,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve seen you walking on the beach before. I saw you pick up the bag and move it along some. It’s a marker, isn’t it, so that you’ll know how far you’ve gone, so you’ll know that you walked a little more than last time?’

  He smiled at her. He had a nice smile, and she felt sure that, although she had now resolutely broken all of her mother’s rules about dealing with strangers, this man would never hurt her.

  ‘That’s very perceptive of you,’ he said, and Amanda wanted to tell him about the dream, but decided not to in case it made her sound weird.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘do you want me to walk with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  So they walked together, and it made her feel grown-up to think that he found some reassurance in her presence. And although it wasn’t far to the bag of stones, she understood the effort that it took for him to reach it. She saw it in the grimace on his face. When they got to it, she offered to reach down and pick it up for him, and he thanked her. They walked a little farther together, and after half a dozen steps he asked her to drop the bag, and she did.