A Song of Shadows

by John Connolly

  So she and Parker sat at her kitchen table while she made coffee. She had brought her Nespresso machine with her to Boreas. She found that she couldn’t live without it now.

  ‘I can open the wine,’ she said. ‘If you’d prefer.’

  ‘No, it’s yours. Anyway, I’m trying to be careful when it comes to alcohol.’

  She brought two cups of coffee to the table. Amanda opted for milk. She took it to the couch in the living room and was soon lost in one of the books, the adults in the next room apparently forgotten.

  ‘You’re very fortunate,’ said Parker, indicating Amanda.

  Even as she tiptoed carefully around this man, Ruth couldn’t help but be pleased at the compliment.

  ‘I know,’ said Ruth. ‘She’s rarely been any trouble, her illness aside.’

  ‘She mentioned that she was sometimes sick.’

  ‘She has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The doctors keep telling us it’ll get better, and we keep waiting, but so far, nothing. There are days when I have to fight the urge to wrap her in blankets and keep her from leaving the house in case some harm befalls her.’ She winced, and the blue pools of her eyes clouded, as though something had stirred up the silt at the bottom. ‘Sometimes I think we’re only put here to watch over our children until they’re ready to take care of themselves.’

  ‘We all have those thoughts,’ he said, and Ruth instinctively flashed on what she had read and heard about him, of the child that he had lost and the wife who had died alongside her. What do we say at such times?

  Nothing, she decided. We say nothing.

  ‘And how are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Recovering,’ he said.

  ‘They talk about you in town.’

  ‘They talk about everybody.’

  ‘Not the way they do about you.’

  ‘We all trail our histories behind us,’ he said.

  Ruth glanced at him, but he did seem to be talking only about himself. Still, she wanted to get him off that track.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so rude!’ she said. ‘I should have offered you something to go with your coffee. We have cookies.’

  ‘Really, it’s okay. The coffee’s great. I wouldn’t want to spoil it by adding the taste of anything else.’

  ‘As long as you’re sure …’

  They tiptoed around the details of each other’s lives. She was conscious of his not prying – no questions about Amanda’s father, for one thing – until at last they came to their respective reasons for being in Boreas.

  ‘A change of scenery,’ said Ruth, walking the tightrope of the lie. ‘I felt cooped up where I was.’

  ‘Amanda told me that you used to live near her grandmother.’

  Ruth looked at her coffee as she answered.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It can be hard. My daughter lives with her mother in some converted buildings on her parents’ property in Vermont. Even though Rachel likes her parents a lot, there are times when she still wants to run away to Bermuda. Or maybe even Siberia.’

  ‘How old is your daughter?’

  ‘Six, going on twenty-six. Her name’s Sam. She’s coming up here the day after tomorrow. Well, I’ll pick her up in Bangor and she’ll stay with me for a couple of nights. Maybe Amanda might like to meet her.’

  Before Ruth could say anything, Amanda had chipped in with a ‘Yes, please!’ That child, Ruth thought: she gave the impression of being lost in her book, but either she had an internal radar that picked up anything of interest, or she had secretly been listening to everything that was said from the start. Ruth suspected the latter. It was why she was always so careful about what she said on the phone when Amanda was around.

  ‘I guess it’s settled, then,’ said Ruth.

  ‘It seems so.’

  ‘Well, give me a call or just drop by. We won’t be doing very much. If we take it easy then, with luck, Amanda will be well enough to go back to school next week.’

  A long sigh from the living room greeted that expression of hope.

  ‘You know that you’re bored,’ Ruth told her. ‘It’ll do you good to be in school.’

  ‘I’m not that bored.’ Another sigh.

  Ruth raised her eyes to heaven, and walked Parker to the door.

  ‘Thanks again for the wine and the books. It wasn’t necessary, but it was still very kind of you.’

  He acknowledged her thanks with a nod, his right hand against the frame of the door. He tapped the place where the mezuzah had once been. A pair of nail holes marked the spot.

  ‘Didn’t you have an ornament or something here?’ he asked.

  He watched her search for an answer.

  ‘Oh, yes. That. I just didn’t care much for it. I’ll find something else to replace it.’

  ‘Something else Jewish?’

  Their eyes met. She folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘I haven’t decided.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Goodbye, Ruth.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, then added: ‘We’ll see you and your daughter over the weekend.’

  ‘I look forward to it,’ he replied, and she waited until he was on the sand before she closed the door.

  Somehow, she even managed a farewell wave.

  17

  From the dunes, Steiger watched in the fading light as the visitor departed from the Winter house. He’d been in there for a long time. Steiger wondered if he was fucking the Winter woman. It didn’t matter to Steiger that her child appeared to be with them in the house. Steiger had spent so long among those to whom morality was an alien concept that he simply assumed all of humanity resembled him in the baseness of its appetites.

  Whether or not this man was screwing Ruth Winter didn’t concern Steiger per se. Steiger would probably have screwed her himself, given the opportunity, but it wasn’t that kind of job, not yet. What worried Steiger was pillow talk. The Winter woman had a lot of hurt and confusion bottled up inside her right now, and a stranger’s touch might be just the catalyst required to pop the cap. If she started talking, then who knew where it might lead? Well, Bruno Perlman knew, as did Lenny Tedesco and his wife, but none of them was now in a position to explain the possible consequences of loose talk to anyone.

  The first step, thought Steiger, was to establish this man’s identity.

  The second, if necessary, was to wipe him off the map.

  On November 19th, 1900, a woman named Mildred Elizabeth Sisk was born in Portland, Maine. Her name changed to Gillars after her mother remarried in 1911, and when Mildred was sixteen the family migrated to Ohio, where she studied dramatic arts at Ohio Wesleyan University. Eventually she drifted east to New York in search of work, then on to Paris for a time, and Algiers, before finally moving to Germany, where she found employment with the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, the Reich Broadcasting Company.

  When her German-born fiancé was killed on the Eastern Front, she fell under the spell of Max Koischwitz, the program director in the USA Zone for RRG, who broadcast anti-Semitic and anti-British propaganda under the name Doctor Anders. Gillars and the married Koischwitz became lovers, and worked together on a show called Home Sweet Home, designed primarily to arouse homesickness in American troops fighting the Germans in North Africa. Thus Gillars became the original Axis Sally. Broadcasting as ‘Midge’, and through judicious use of music, she played on the soldiers’ concerns about their mission, their officers, the women they had left behind, and what awaited them after the war. The propaganda was heavy-handed, and largely ineffective, but the GIs liked the music choices. If nothing else, Gillars had good taste in tunes, with a particular fondness for swing.

  Gillars continued to broadcast from Berlin until the German surrender, after which she vanished into the postwar chaos, but the United States attorney general was determined to track her down. The alias Barbara Mome was linked to her, and the net began to close when an antique dealer sold a table for a woman of the same name, leading soldiers to an address in the British s
ector of Berlin in March 1946. Gillars was arrested, taking with her only a photo of her now deceased lover, and returned to the United States for trial. She served twelve years for treason in the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia before being paroled in 1961, after which she became a teacher at the Sisters of the Poor Child Catholic convent school near Columbus, Ohio. She died, largely unknown, in 1988.

  In the quiet of his home, the Jigsaw Man listened to a recreation of one of Axis Sally’s broadcasts. He had put it together himself, interspersing recordings of her slightly German-accented voice with tunes from the era of which he was fond.

  ‘As one American to another,’ Sally purred, ‘do you love the British? Well, of course the answer is no. Do the British love us? Well, I should say not …’

  Her voice faded away as Count Basie emerged from the mix with ‘Lullaby of Birdland.’ Only when Earl Steiger tapped on the window glass did the Jigsaw Man reluctantly pull himself from his reverie to admit him.

  18

  Parker didn’t wake gradually, but shot up straight in bed, his head exploding, his vision pinpricked by white-hot explosions of light, like phosphorous flares in the night. He felt the shotgun pellets ripping through his scalp, embedding themselves in his skull. He tried to hide from them and tumbled to the floor, his head in his hands, as bullets tore through his torso, one of them breaking a rib, a second nicking the upper part of his pelvis and sending shards of bone tearing into his intestines. A third came, bursting a kidney, and now every pain receptor in his body was alight.

  He curled in upon himself on the bare boards, his mouth wide in agony both real and remembered, no longer capable of separating one from the other. This headache was the worst yet: in its intensity it reactivated the hurt of half-healed wounds, and returned him to that night in Scarborough when he had crawled through his home, trailing blood, wishing for them to come, willing them to end it all.

  The pain, incredibly, grew more ferocious. The scar left by his laparotomy – the vertical abdominal incision used to open him up after the shooting – started to burn, and he thought he could feel the holes left by the chest drains stretching and opening. He tried gritting his teeth against it all, and tears forced themselves from the corners of his eyes, but he was brought no release. He was certain that tonight, after all he had endured, he must surely die.

  A cool hand was laid on his forehead, the skin so chill as to be spangled with frost. Through his tears he saw it gleaming in the moonlight, sparkling like the light of dead stars. A voice spoke

  daddy

  and he felt the coldness of her breath, and smelled the scent of a world beyond this one. He began to tremble, for her touch burned coldly, but the agony slowly subsided, and his wounds ceased their singing, and her lips touched his cheek and left a mark that he would see in the mirror for days to come.

  hush daddy hush

  And he lay on the floor in a fever dream as his dead daughter comforted him.

  19

  The next day, the Maine State Police got their first break in the search for Oran Wilde.

  Oran owned a smartphone, but it had only been used once since the morning of the killings, when Oran had sent his closest friend, Clyde Marshal, a link to an article on Reddit relating to the weaponry used in the movie Lone Survivor, which Oran had seen on cable the night before. This link, relatively innocuous in itself – Oran was simply identifying weaponry that he had used in various PS3 games – was taken by police as further evidence of his disturbed nature, and its discovery resulted in Clyde Marshal being questioned for twenty-four hours about any possible foreknowledge he might have had of the events at the Wilde house. Marshal was eventually released without charge, but his phone, too, was being monitored, and when Oran Wilde’s phone eventually pinged back into action, it was to Marshal that he sent the following message:

  I’m okay, Cly. Just need to figure shit out. This is all a big mistake. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I’ll explain when I can. Oran.

  While the phone was immediately switched off after the message was sent, the battery was not removed, allowing the MSP to begin the process of triangulation. The trace was almost complete when Oran apparently realized that he had forgotten about the battery, whereupon the signal was lost, but not before the MSP had narrowed the source down to a square mile of ground that took in the Veterans Cemetery outside Augusta.

  And it was there that the body of the homeless man was found.

  His name was Richie Benoit, and he was a veteran of the first Iraq war, a drug addict, and the father of three children by two different women, neither of whom he had ever gotten round to marrying. He had been roughing it, on and off, for about five years, and died from three stab wounds to the chest from a short-bladed knife, which was discovered near his body. Although he carried no identification, Benoit was well known locally, mainly because there was hardly a convenience store in Augusta from which he hadn’t at some point been ejected for attempted theft. Fingerprints on the knife were matched to prints taken from Oran Wilde’s bedroom, and further forensic examination found traces of Oran’s blood on the fingers of Benoit’s right hand, indicating that a struggle might have taken place during which Benoit had scratched or otherwise injured the boy. In the narrative under construction, it appeared that Oran might have killed Benoit in order to rob him of what little money he had, although it was also suggested that some altercation might have occurred between them, possibly when Oran came upon Benoit sleeping on the street, or vice versa.

  Roadblocks were put in place on all major and minor roads in and out of Augusta, and police began canvassing the area around the cemetery, searching garages, basements, empty lots, Dumpsters – anywhere a teenage boy might try to hide from his pursuers.

  But no trace of Oran Wilde was found.

  II

  She had confronted Barbie during the pretrial proceedings – what the French call l’instruction – and when he was asked if he recognized her, he said, ‘When you have been in prison for seven months it’s always agreeable to see a desirable woman.’ When Simone Lagrange said that his remark insulted her, he said, ‘The trouble with you is you can’t take a joke.’

  Former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, known as the ‘Butcher of Lyons’, in exchanges with Simone Lagrange, who, at the age of thirteen, was beaten and interrogated by him at Gestapo headquarters in Lyons before being sent to Auschwitz (from ‘Voices from the Barbie Trial’ by Ted Morgan, New York Times, August 2nd, 1987).

  20

  While police swarmed Augusta, a TV news crew traced one of the mothers of Richie Benoit’s children, a woman named Muriel Landler, who lived in the smallest apartment the reporter had ever seen, made even more cramped by the presence of two children and three cats. Landler appeared genuinely upset to hear of Benoit’s death, but still managed to negotiate a cash payment of $1000 before speaking to the camera, in order to pay off her auto loan lender, which had disabled her car using the starter interrupt device in the dashboard, even though she was only four days late with her payment.

  ‘Who said,’ as she told the reporter while pocketing the cash, ‘that fucking technology makes our lives easier? Ten years ago they’d have had to send some fat fuck to find me.’

  The reporter blanched slightly and asked her not to swear on camera.

  ‘Who’s swearing?’ asked Muriel.

  ‘You just did.’

  ‘Did I? Fuck.’

  In the end, they only had to bleep her once, which was considered a minor miracle under the circumstances.

  The call from Epstein came as Parker was throwing back his second painkiller. It helped the thumping in his head, but didn’t do much for the nausea.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Epstein.

  ‘In Boreas. It’s—’

  ‘I know where it is. I thought that I might come visit you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In a couple of hours, I should think.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  �
��When am I not? Liat is driving me. You remember Liat, don’t you?’

  Oh yes, thought Parker. Yes, I do.

  ‘I have a favor to ask of you, too,’ said Epstein. ‘It relates to the late Bruno Perlman …’

  Epstein and Liat arrived in Boreas shortly after one p.m. Parker was waiting for them at Kramer & Sons Funeral Home, along with Cory Bloom. The rabbi hugged Parker, and introduced himself and the woman with him to Bloom. The woman, Liat, said nothing, which caused Bloom to bristle slightly until Epstein explained that Liat could neither speak nor hear. It was the interaction between Liat and Parker that particularly interested Bloom, though. There was a tenderness to the way the woman looked at him, and when she held him her lips brushed his cheek, and she closed her eyes for a moment. When she parted from him, he placed his right hand to his mouth, the fingers close to the lips, then moved it forward and down in her direction, so that he appeared almost to be blowing her a kiss. Liat’s face lit up at the gesture, and Bloom found herself gasping at the woman’s true beauty, which had been concealed until then by her sternness.

  It emerged that Epstein had been in Boston for a meeting, and had already been considering a detour north to visit Parker and see how he was. He informed Bloom that he considered the subsequent call about Bruno Perlman as ‘a nudge from the Most High.’