A Game of Ghosts: A Charlie Parker Thriller: 15. From the No. 1 Bestselling Author of A Time of Torment

by John Connolly

  ‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Mom.’

  She went to him, her arms open to enfold him.

  ‘What is it, Alex? What is it, baby?’

  And she saw them even as he spoke.

  ‘Mom, there are people in the woods.’

  10

  Parker ate dinner alone at the Farmhouse Tap & Grill on Bank Street. He was reading a biography of the writer John le Carré, and thought that le Carré would have made a very good undercover cop if he could just have learned to better accommodate himself to his secret sense of shame.

  Parker limited himself to one glass of wine. He was feeling maudlin, and he didn’t want to exacerbate it. He was worried about Sam, and Rachel. He was also worried about himself. He was glad for the distraction offered by Jaycob Eklund’s possible disappearance. While he had a couple of cases open in Portland, they were routine bits of business for Moxie Castin and a couple of other lawyers, mostly involving the transfer of papers from his hand to another. It was dull, safe work. If he were smart, he’d have limited himself to juggling envelopes for lawyers, and then wouldn’t have found himself eating alone in a bar in Burlington, Vermont, trying to figure out how to keep his former girlfriend from getting in touch with the Family Division of the Vermont court system.

  Then again, if he were that smart, and that careful, he’d have been someone else.

  The easiest money he’d earned all year had come from a woman named Thea Bentling, who was convinced that her husband, Steve, was cheating on her. As it turned out, Thea was right: Steve was seeing another woman called Sherri Sweetman, a name that would have suited a grade school teacher, which, conveniently, was precisely what Sherri was. She was also, as it happened, married to Dave Ohlson, who was a client of Moxie’s. Ohlson had recently approached Moxie because he believed that his wife – who had kept her maiden name, possibly because it was just so damn cute – was less faithful to him than he might ideally have wished. Moxie had put Ohlson in touch with Parker, who had already been engaged by Thea Bentling to follow her errant husband.

  Parker followed Steve Bentling to a new boho coffee shop in South Portland, where Bentling met Sherri Sweetman, whose details Parker had been handed not an hour earlier by Moxie himself. Bentling and Sweetman took themselves to an inexpensive motel in which to spend some quality time together, while Parker snapped pictures of them with his phone and wondered how anyone could believe they might be able to keep an affair secret in a town so small. The cheating couple’s idea of being discreet was to take the Casco Bay Bridge from Portland into South Portland, maybe because there were folks in Portland who seemed to regard South Portland as not just another city – which it was – but possibly another existential realm entirely, compounded by the fact that they had to cross water to get to it. When Parker met Moxie to tell him, the lawyer almost choked laughing, and Parker collected two fees for what was essentially the same job.

  He finished a chapter of the biography and called for the check. He’d walked to the bar, and now he headed back toward his lodgings as the last of the falling snow thinned before ceasing. He felt the crunch of it beneath his feet. He wished Sam were with him. He kept one hand in his pocket and the other by his side, as though by doing so he might conjure up the sensation of her walking with him, her gloved hand in his, her small footsteps trailing beside his own.

  His thoughts of Sam inevitably brought to mind his lost daughter, and he peered into the trees at either side of the street, and into the shadows between the houses, both hoping and fearing to see a flicker in the darkness as of a child shadowing him while leaving no mark upon the newly fallen snow. So lost in thought did he become that he failed to notice the car parked outside the inn, or the individual who emerged from it as he drew near the gate. Only when the man stepped forward did Parker stop and look into his face.

  Rachel’s father was standing before him. Frank Wolfe was wearing a long gray coat, and a trilby with a feather in the band. He looked like a dad from an old movie, right down to his gray mustache.

  Parker and Frank had never gotten along, and recent events had done nothing to bring them closer together. When the identity of Sam’s abductor was revealed, along with his connection to her father, it was all that Frank’s wife and daughter had been able to do to keep him from outright physical assault on Parker. Since then, they had neither seen each other nor even exchanged a word over the phone, and yet Parker was not particularly surprised to see him. It was that kind of day.

  ‘Frank,’ he said. ‘How long have you been waiting out here?’

  ‘Couple of hours. I told them I was going to catch a movie.’

  ‘What did you go see?’

  ‘What?’ He looked confused.

  ‘When you get home, Rachel and your wife will ask what movie you went to see. You should have an answer. Unless you’re going to tell them the truth.’

  Frank Wolfe wasn’t used to lying. While it would have been an understatement to say he and Parker did not see eye to eye, the detective did not doubt that Frank loved both his daughter and his grandchild deeply. Rachel’s old man was a straight arrow, and it was not in his nature to be dishonest. He lived a comfortable, privileged life, which might have been part of the problem, but he would have been wealthier and more privileged still if he had been prepared to compromise his own moral code. He thought of himself as a good man, but truly good men never think of themselves in that way at all.

  Frank looked at the trees, and the street, and his car as though he had suddenly found himself in an unfamiliar environment with no recollection of how he might have arrived there. He breathed out deeply, his breath pluming, and Parker caught the distinct smell of alcohol. Frank wasn’t drunk, not yet, but he’d been drinking enough to earn himself a DUI if he were pulled over. If the cops didn’t get him, then a combination of the weather and his own dulled reactions might ensure that a collision would.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Parker asked.

  ‘I came to talk to you.’

  Parker could think of few people with whom he wanted to talk less, but a conversation offered the possibility of clearing the air. Relations would simply continue to deteriorate if he sent Frank on his way, assuming he made it home alive, or without an involuntary detour to the nearest police station.

  ‘It’s cold. Why don’t we go inside and sit down?’

  Parker gestured to the inn. It had a couple of common areas where guests could work or read if they chose. The room at the front, to the left of the door, was empty. He could see it through the open drapes.

  Frank nodded, and Parker led the way along the snow-covered path to the warmth of his lodgings.

  11

  May MacKinnon stood at her kitchen window and stared out at the woods that marked the boundary of her backyard. She thought about calling the police, but she wasn’t ready to do that, not yet. Despite her husband’s disappearance, and all the possible fates she had imagined for him, she remained inclined to think the best of people, and to trust in an ordered universe, because only in a universe in which people were good, and order was the natural state, might her husband not have suffered too much before he died.

  She was also experiencing a readjustment of the senses, a selective distortion of her own memory and perceptions. She believed that she had seen figures in the woods, but had found herself struggling to keep them in focus. They resembled those tricks involving symbols on cards, in which the symbol momentarily disappeared from view when the card was placed in the blind spot of one’s eye. When she tried to look directly at any individual form moving between the trees, that figure would seem to be swallowed by the shadows while the rest remained visible. If her gaze shifted, then the previously unseen man or woman would flicker back into sight at the periphery of her vision.

  Now, downstairs in her kitchen with the lights deliberately left off, the better for her to hide herself as she monitored her property, May could no longer detect signs of movement. An atavistic part of her mind – seldom used, a relic of an o
lder humanity – was sending conflicting messages: it was warning her not to go outside while simultaneously trying to suggest to her that she had been mistaken in what she supposed herself to have seen.

  But Alex had been with her. He had seen them too, right? And the voice in her head, the one that spoke like a version of her absent husband, answered:

  But you were worried about him. You were concerned that he might have injured himself, and he in turn was frightened because he had concealed his accident from you. Each of you communicated fear to the other, and each of you fed upon it in turn.

  ‘And from that we both conjured up people in the woods?’

  She said the words aloud, whispering them to an entity in her head, one that was doing a damn fine job of imitating Mike, right down to the foreign cadences of his speech, the way he always paused between sentences, no matter how angry, happy, or sad he was. He was a deliberate man, a mindful one. But the voice that was causing her to doubt herself was not quite right, for one simple reason.

  Mike would never have tried to make her doubt herself.

  Her skepticism drove it away. She was glad. She would entertain no phantasms of her lost spouse.

  Then it came to her: gypsies. A group of them had passed through town earlier in the year – three interrelated families, according to the police, who monitored their presence from the moment they’d parked their motorhomes in the lot of the Walmart out by Airway Drive. They’d been a mix of ages, just like the folk she’d glimpsed in the woods. They hadn’t caused any trouble – hadn’t been given the opportunity to, according to certain people in town, since the cops and the mall guards sent them on their way after the second night, waking them in the darkness so they left with crying children and confused, barking dogs. May didn’t care for this, since they didn’t seem to her to be doing any harm. Then again, May was the only person in her family who thought that Bernie Sanders would have made a good president, so what did she know?

  Could this be part of the same group, or some other come to set up camp in the woods now that the mall had been ruled out as a possible halting site? May felt her liberal credentials being sorely tested. It was one thing having gypsies camped out at the mall, but another entirely having them lighting fires within sight of her own backyard.

  Don’t go out there.

  It wasn’t Mike’s voice any longer. It wasn’t any voice she had ever heard before. It spoke to her as a patient parent might speak to a child on the verge of doing something unwise, but May was already pulling on the gardening boots that always stood ready by the back door, and putting on Mike’s old coat, the one he kept hanging in the closet by the laundry room, and which she refused to put away. Sometimes, when it was cold, she would wrap herself in it, sit on the kitchen floor, and close her eyes, imagining that it was Mike who was with her, Mike who was holding her.

  Mike, Mike: why did you have to leave?

  She heard a noise behind her. Alex was standing at the foot of the stairs, wrapped in a robe to keep out the cold.

  ‘Mom? Did you call the police?’

  ‘Not yet. We don’t know who they are.’

  Or even if they are, she wanted to add, but did not. Christ, where did that come from?

  ‘Mom, I saw a man in the woods today.’

  ‘A man? What man?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was dressed weird. One second he was there, the next he was gone. I think he was floating on the snow. He made me fall off my bike.’

  He started to cry.

  ‘I should have told you, but I was scared.’

  Her saliva crackled in her ears, like the sound of bacon sizzling in a skillet.

  I won’t go far, she thought. I’ll step to the edge of the ring cast by the security light, and if I see anything, anything at all, I’ll be back inside before you can say cock robin.

  ‘You lock the door behind me, you hear?’

  ‘Mom—’

  ‘It’s okay. I just want to look.’

  She opened the back door and stepped into the yard.

  12

  A Nespresso machine sat in a corner of the inn’s library, beside a bookcase filled with the kind of works designed to be looked at, or flicked through, but never actually read. A couple of airport novels were interspersed, like yokels who’d stumbled in on intellectuals’ night at the local meeting hall.

  Parker had no idea what the colors of the Nespresso capsules signified, so he just found two that matched and made Frank Wolfe a double, then followed it with a single cup for himself. Frank unbuttoned his coat, but didn’t seem willing to remove it until Parker took off his own jacket and tossed it on a couch. He asked Frank if he wanted cream in his coffee.

  ‘Just black,’ said Frank, then added, ‘thank you.’

  Which was something.

  Parker brought the coffee and took a seat in an upright chair opposite Rachel’s father. Frank didn’t look well. The cold should have added some red to his nose and cheeks, but they retained only a kind of yellowish pallor. Parker had a vague recollection of yellow skin being a sign of liver problems. He wondered if Frank was seeing a doctor about it, then remembered with whom he was living: at the first sign of illness, Rachel and her mother would have taken him to a physician, at gunpoint if necessary.

  Parker sipped his coffee. He could have tried to engage in small talk, but both men were long past that. It hadn’t worked in the past, and nothing had changed between them to make it likely to work now. Eventually, Frank broke the silence.

  ‘I hear it didn’t go so good today, with Sam’s psychologist.’

  ‘The psychologist is doing fine. She couldn’t be better. Sam seemed happy too. Your daughter and I were the problem.’

  ‘Rachel might say you were the problem.’

  Parker took a deep breath, and wondered if the world was determined to test his ability to control his temper right to the last. He was glad he hadn’t ordered a second glass of wine. It wouldn’t have mellowed him at all. Even now, completely sober after his walk back to the inn, he felt the urge to let rip at Frank Wolfe, but it would not have served any purpose.

  ‘I think I did okay, but I admit I might not be the best judge,’ said Parker. ‘And I’ve had better days.’

  ‘Yeah, well …’

  Frank tried his coffee. He looked confused.

  ‘It tastes like mulled wine,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know what the colors mean,’ said Parker. ‘I just grabbed the first two that came to hand. You want something different?’

  ‘No, it’ll do. It’s just strange.’

  ‘It’s sophisticated, apparently.’

  ‘Must be why I didn’t recognize it. I drink instant at home.’

  He sipped some more, and didn’t frown quite so much the second time.

  ‘What happened to Sam, the abduction …’

  Parker waited. Frank used a thumb to wipe coffee drips from the rim of his cup, but didn’t look up.

  ‘I wanted to blame you for it,’ he said. ‘Still do.’

  Now he lifted his gaze. Parker thought that he didn’t look angry, or bitter, just bewildered.

  ‘Do you blame yourself?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Parker. ‘I couldn’t control events once they unraveled, and couldn’t have known what that man would try to do in the aftermath, but I helped to set them in motion, and they concluded with him taking Sam.’

  ‘It might have ended badly. The way it did end was bad enough.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Frank nodded.

  ‘I used to think we had nothing in common, you and I,’ he said. ‘It was what I wanted to believe, but all the time I saw something in you that I saw in myself when I looked in the mirror. I saw a man who’d buried one of his children.’

  Rachel’s older brother had been a state policeman, shot and killed in the course of a bank raid long before Parker and Rachel met. Parker knew that part of what had attracted Rachel to him was an echo of loss, but also of rage. Her res
ponse to her brother’s death had been to try to understand, as though an exploration of the psychology of criminals might enable her to comprehend why her brother had been taken from her. But another part of her, one that it troubled her even to acknowledge, wanted to lash out, to inflict pain in return for pain. It was an aspect of herself that she had refused to indulge, but then Parker entered her life, and as he unleashed himself on those responsible for his own pain and loss, she allowed a little of her own anger to feed his. She didn’t like the results, or told herself that she didn’t, even as her secret self exulted.

  ‘You’d think I’d remember it all,’ he continued, ‘but I don’t. I have fragments, but I’m missing pieces of my memories. I remember being at the hospital, but I don’t recall how I got there. I remember the graveside, but not the church. And when I try to picture my boy, I see him only as still images. He doesn’t move.

  ‘And I can’t hear his voice,’ he concluded. ‘I can’t bring it to mind. It’s like death wiped the tapes.’

  They had never spoken of this before. Parker wasn’t sure that Frank had talked like this with Rachel, or even with his wife. Rachel always described her father’s grief as silent and intensely personal. His inability to share or discuss it had blighted her mother’s life, she said, because it forced her mother to grieve for her son alone.

  ‘I thought about killing myself,’ he said. ‘That only came later, when the pain was no longer so bad, when it had dulled. But the problem was that everything had dulled, not just the pain. It all went gray.’

  ‘And why didn’t you take your own life?’ asked Parker.

  ‘Rachel,’ came the answer. ‘My daughter kept me alive. Not even my wife could do that.’

  He put his cup down.

  ‘But you didn’t have another child, not then, and your wife died with your daughter. So how did you stay alive?’

  ‘By hunting the man who had done that to me,’ said Parker. ‘By finding him and killing him.’

  ‘And you did.’