Nocturnes (2004)

by John Connolly

  I had dropped some cash over at Bull Moose earlier, and now flicked idly through my purchases. Some of them would probably be okay with Rachel, I guessed: the Notwist, and maybe Thee More Shallows. I wasn’t too sure how she would feel about And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, but I’d heard some of their stuff on one of the more vibrant local radio stations and liked it a lot. It was also a cool name for a band, which counted for something. I figured that if I could find a T-shirt with the band’s name on it, I might be allowed to hang out with the slacker kids for a while, at least until the cops came by and decided to haul me in for my own safety.

  My client arrived at 6.25 P.M. I knew him by his clothing. He had told me to expect a man in a gray suit with a gray-black tie, a black overcoat protecting him from the cold, and that was what I got. He looked younger than I expected, although I guessed that he was probably close to seventy by now. I decided not to share my Trail of Dead CD with him. I thought it might be pushing things a little on our first meeting. I raised a hand to let him know who I was, and he threaded his way through the computer stations to take a seat with me at the window, casting some suspicious glances at some of the, well, more “sheltered” patrons.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “They won’t hurt you.”

  He looked a little uncertain, but gave them the benefit of the doubt. “Frank Matheson,” he said, stretching out his hand. It was a big hand, scarred in places. A huge callus stretched across his palm from the base of his thumb. I could feel it as I shook his hand. Matheson owned a machine tool company over in Solon, and was a reasonably wealthy man, but he had clearly come by it through hard graft. I bought him a coffee—black, no sugar—and rejoined him at the window.

  “I’m surprised that you don’t have an office,” he said.

  “If I had an office I’d have to paint it, then buy chairs and a desk. I’d have to think about what to put on the walls. People would judge me on the quality of my furnishings.”

  “And what do they judge you on now?”

  “The quality of other people’s coffee. It’s pretty good in this place.”

  “You meet all of your clients here?”

  “Depends. If I’m not sure about them, I meet them in Star-bucks. If I’m really not sure about them, I meet them at a gas station, maybe offer them a couple of Milk Duds to break the ice.”

  A look of confusion crossed his face, as though a small warning light had just tripped in his brain. I get that look a lot.

  “You come highly recommended,” he said, apparently to reassure himself rather than to compliment me.

  “Probably people I brought to this place.”

  “Plus I’ve read about you in the newspapers.”

  “Yet still you’re here.”

  He made a wavering gesture with his right hand. “I’ll admit that not all of it was complimentary.”

  “I believe it’s called ‘balanced reporting.’ ”

  Matheson allowed himself a smile, although I still wasn’t certain that the little warning light had extinguished itself entirely. He sipped his coffee, lifting the cup with that callused right hand. It trembled slightly. His left had never ceased clutching the leather attaché case on his lap.

  “I should tell you why I’m here,” he said. “I suppose I should start with my family. My—”

  I interrupted him.

  “Is this about your daughter, Mr. Matheson?”

  He didn’t look too surprised. I guessed that it happened a lot. It probably took a little while for the name to register with some people, but they’d get there in the end. I imagined Frank Matheson, sitting in his office with a prospective customer, seeing the eyes narrow, the hands move awkwardly.

  Was your daughter Louise Matheson? Jesus, I’m sorry, that was a terrible thing that happened. Death was too good for that guy, what was his name? Grady, yeah.

  John Grady.

  “In a way,” said Matheson.

  He opened his case.

  “I brought some material along, just in case you didn’t know about what happened, or needed some background.”

  Inside, I could see a plastic folder. It contained copies of newspaper clippings and photographs. He didn’t remove it.

  “I know about it,” I said.

  “It was a long time ago. You must have been very young when it occurred.”

  “It was a famous case, and people here don’t forget things like that too easily. They stay in the memory, and get passed along. Maybe it’s right that they should.”

  He didn’t reply. I knew that his daughter was always in his memory, frozen in death at the age of ten. I wondered if he ever tried to picture what she might have been like had she lived, how she might have looked, what she might be doing with her life. I wondered if he ever saw other young women on the street, and in their faces caught glimpses of his own departed child, a faint trace of her, as though she were briefly inhabiting the body of another, trying to make contact with her family and the life denied her.

  Because I saw my own dead child in the children of others, and I did not believe that I was alone in experiencing my loss in such a way.

  “I know about you as well,” said Matheson. “That’s why I want to hire you. I believed you’d understand.”

  “Understand what, Mr. Matheson?”

  He reached into his case and withdrew a brown envelope. He slid the envelope toward me. It was unsealed. Inside was a single piece of unfolded paper, glossy on one side. I removed it and looked at the copy of the black-and-white photograph on the sheet. It showed a child, a little girl. The photo had been taken from a distance away, but the child’s face was clear. She was holding a softball bat, her attention focused on an unseen ball beyond the limits of the picture. The girl wasn’t wearing a helmet, and her brown hair hung loose around her shoulders. Even at a distance, and allowing for the relatively poor quality of the photo, she was a beautiful child.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I looked at the photograph again. There was nothing in it to indicate where it might have been taken. There was just the girl, the bat, and grass and dark trees in the distance. I turned the sheet over, but the reverse side was blank.

  “Where’s the original?”

  “The cops at Two Mile Lake have it.”

  “You want to tell me how you came by it?”

  He took the photograph from me and carefully placed it on the counter ledge before putting the envelope on top of it so that it was entirely covered.

  “You know who owns the Grady house?”

  “No, but I could hazard a guess.”

  “Which would be?”

  “That you own the Grady house.”

  He nodded. “The bank put it up for sale about two years after my Louise’s murder. There were no other bidders. I didn’t pay very much for it. Under other circumstances, you might even have said that I got a bargain.”

  “You left it standing.”

  “What would you have expected me to do: raze it?”

  “It’s what a lot of folks would have done.”

  “Not me. I wanted it to remain as a monument to what was done to my daughter and to those other children. I felt that if it was removed from the earth, then people would start to forget. Does that make sense to you?”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense to me. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you and your family.”

  “My wife doesn’t understand. She never has. She thinks that all traces of John Grady should have been wiped away. She doesn’t need anything to remind her of what happened to Louise. It’s always with her, every single day.”

  Matheson seemed to retreat from me for a moment, and I watched his relationship with his wife reflected in his eyes like a rerun of a desolate old movie. In some ways, it was a miracle that they had stayed together. Both as a policeman and as an investigator, I had seen marriages disintegrate under the burden of grief. People speak about a shared sorrow, but the death of a
child is so often not apportioned in the same way between a father and a mother. It is experienced simultaneously, but the grief is insidious in its individuality. Couples drown in it, sinking beneath the surface, each unable to reach out and touch the other, incapable of seeking solace in the love that they feel, or once felt, for each other. It is particularly terrible for those who lose an only child. The great bond between them is severed, and in some cases they simply drift away into loneliness and isolation.

  I waited.

  “Can I ask you what you did with your house, after what happened?” he asked.

  I knew the question would come.

  “I sold it.”

  “Have you ever been back there?”

  “No.”

  “You know who lives there now?”

  “A young couple. They have two children.”

  “Do they know that a woman and a child were killed in that house?”

  “I guess that they do.”

  “You think it troubles them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they feel that what happened there once can never happen again.”

  “But they’d be wrong. Life doesn’t abide by such simple rules.”

  “Do you feel that way about the Grady house, Mr. Matheson?”

  His fingers trailed across the envelope, seeking to find the lineaments of the face of the unknown girl hidden beneath. I thought again of new-fallen snow, and how I once believed I could see the outlines of faces beneath it, like the shapes of skulls beneath white skin. That was later, when I left behind the child I once was and those whom I loved began to fall away.

  “You asked me where I found the photograph, Mr. Parker. I found it in the mailbox of the Grady house. It was in a torn envelope. The envelope had been sealed, then opened by someone to get at what was inside. Judging by the marks on the envelope, I’d guess there was more than one photograph in it originally. The shape of the remaining photograph didn’t quite match the marks of the bulge in the envelope. That’s how I knew.”

  “Do you check the mailbox often?”

  “Nope, just occasionally. I don’t go to the house much anymore.”

  “When did you find the photograph?”

  “One week ago.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I took it to the police.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a photograph of a little girl, placed in the mailbox of a house once owned by a child killer. At the very least, someone has a sick sense of humor.”

  “Is that what the police think?”

  “They told me that they’d see what they could do. I wanted them to go to the newspapers and the TV people, get this little girl’s picture shown across the state so that we could find out who she is, and—”

  “And warn her?”

  He drew a breath, and his eyes closed as he nodded.

  “And warn her,” he echoed.

  “You think she’s in danger, because someone put a photo of her in Grady’s mailbox?”

  “Like I said, at the very least the person who put that picture there has a disturbed mind. Who would even want to link a little girl with that place?”

  I slipped the envelope away and looked at the print of the child’s picture again.

  “Was the photograph old, Mr. Matheson?”

  “I don’t think so. It looked recent to me.”

  “And the photograph itself was black-and-white, not just the copy that you made?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Anything on the back to indicate that it came from a lab? You know, any identifying marks, brand names?”

  “It was Kodak paper, that’s all I know.”

  That paper could be purchased in any camera store in the country. Whoever took the photograph had probably developed it in his own home or garage. It was simple enough to do, with the right equipment. That way, there was no chance of a curious lab worker spying suspicious photographs of playing children and calling in the cops to investigate the individual behind the camera.

  The child really was beautiful. She looked happy and healthy, and the intensity of her concentration on the ball about to head her way made me smile.

  “What would you like me to do, Mr. Matheson?”

  “I want you to see if you can discover who this girl is. I want you to talk to her parents. I’ll come with you, when you find them. They should know about this.”

  “That’s going to be difficult. Have you spoken to the police?”

  “They won’t tell me anything, except that it’s under investigation and that I shouldn’t worry. They said it was probably nothing.”

  Maybe they were right. There were those who might find amusing or arousing the idea of associating a little girl’s image with the memory of a child killer, but their actual potential for harm was likely to be limited. And yet someone had gone to the trouble of snapping at least one photograph of an unsuspecting little girl, and if Matheson was right in his suspicions, then there were probably more photos, some perhaps of this child, but some possibly of other children.

  “I was also wondering if you might watch the Grady house for a while, just in case the person who left this picture comes back.”

  Wintering at the Grady house didn’t sound like the best way to get into the Christmas spirit. I tried not to let my reluctance show, but it was hard.

  “Have you seen any signs of damage to the house,” I asked, “any indications that someone might have tried to get inside?”

  “Nope, it’s sealed up good and tight. I have a set of keys, and the police at Two Mile have another set. I gave it to them after some lunatic tried to get onto the roof and start a fire there a couple of years back. I don’t know if they’ve been inside since I gave them the photograph.”

  I touched the picture of the little girl with my fingertips. My fingers brushed the image of her hair.

  “It’s kind of an obvious question, but have you seen anybody hanging around the property, or has anyone displayed excessive interest in what went on there?”

  “Well, we had some trouble with a man named Ray Czabo, but the chief warned him off. I don’t think he’s been back since. You know him?”

  Matheson couldn’t have missed the pained look that crossed my face. Voodoo Ray Czabo was a death tourist from Maine, a haunter of crime scenes. He liked taking pictures of places in which people had died. When the cops were finished with their work, he would sometimes remove “souvenirs” from the location and try to hawk them on the Net. Ray Czabo and I had history. He had visited the house in Brooklyn in which my wife and daughter were killed, and had stolen from outside the door the carved wooden block upon which the house number was engraved.

  I got it back, though.

  Since then, Ray had kept out of my way, even though he now lived up in Bangor, in a small house off Exit 48 close by Husson College.

  “Yeah, I know Ray Czabo,” I said.

  The Grady house would appeal to someone like Ray. I felt pretty certain that he’d been down there on more than one occasion. He must have found it galling to be denied access to its secrets.

  “Was Ray the only one?”

  Matheson was holding something back. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps he wanted to be certain that I was going to take the case before he told me, but I’d learned that lesson the hard way. Now I liked to know what I was getting into before it all began to fall down around my ears.

  “There was another man, a few days ago. He came to the plant. You should understand, Mr. Parker, that very few people know about my ownership of the Grady house. Officially, the title is held by a company that shares its address with a particularly litigious firm of lawyers in Augusta. They’re not even my own lawyers. They were sourced independently. Yet this man arrived at my office and told my secretary he was interested in placing a large order. He seemed to know what he was talking about, so she called me. I was out on the floor at the time, and I came back to meet him.

  “The first thing that struck me was that he wasn�
��t there to buy anything from my company. He was dressed in a thread-bare coat, there were stains on his trousers, and the sole was coming away from his left shoe. I couldn’t tell the last time his shirt had been properly washed, and he wore a dead man’s tie. Don’t get me wrong: in my business, I see a lot of people who work with their hands, and I’m not afraid to get my own hands and clothes dirty. But that’s, I don’t know, honest dirt, hard won and nothing for a man to be ashamed of. This guy, though, he was just plain filthy. I almost threw him out of my office before he had a chance to open his mouth. Maybe I should have.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Tall. Taller than you. His hair was black, and long. It was hanging over his shirt collar. It was receding pretty badly, and he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. His skin was very white. Don’t recall the color of his eyes, if that’s the kind of detail you need to know. His fingertips and nails were stained yellow. I guess he was a smoker, but he didn’t light up while he was with me.”

  “He give you a name?”

  “No. I introduced myself, shook his hand—although I kind of regretted doing it—but he didn’t give me a card or a name. He just told me he had come about a delicate matter.

  ‘I believe that you are the owner of the Grady house.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I think that you do. There is a debt outstanding upon the house. An opportunity is about to arise for its payment.’

  ‘I told you: I think you have the wrong man.’

  “I tried to convince him, but the guy just didn’t want to listen. He knew that the Grady house belonged to me. I don’t know how, but he did. When I checked with the lawyers, they told me that there had been no formal inquiries about the house for years, apart from a couple of media hounds howling down the phone on the anniversary of Grady’s death. Next thing I know, he’s rattling off details of the purchase: the price, the date the final agreement was signed, even the name of the bank manager at the time. It was like he had a file in front of him and was just reading the stuff from it. I was so surprised, I couldn’t even speak for a minute. Then I started to get angry. I mean, what business did this guy have coming in to my office and demanding payment for bills that were nothing to do with me anyway? It was all that I could do to stop myself climbing over the desk and dragging him out of the office by his collar.”