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

by John Connolly

  And with those words, the dam that Rachel had placed around all her sadness and anguish in order to keep functioning was breached. The sound she heard herself make was like the yelp of a wounded animal, its paw pierced by a spike or broken in a trap. She tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t move. Her stomach heaved, and she tasted stale coffee. She wanted to scream, but her throat seized up. An aspect small and fragile broke deep inside her, and she knew that it could never be repaired.

  Sam saw her mother go pale, then sway as though she were about to faint. Tears began to fall from her eyes, but her face remained absolutely still, her lips parted in a little oval of shock. It was like watching a doll cry, and Sam knew that she had done this, all with a few words that were out of her mouth before she even knew what she was saying. She wanted to take them back, to swallow them down like bad medicine, rewinding time. She’d set out to wound her mother, and now that she’d succeeded she wanted nothing more than to unwound and unspeak.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mommy,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean it. Don’t cry. Please, don’t cry.’

  She scrambled across the bed and wrapped her arms around her mother, whispering her name, saying ‘Sorry’ over and over, but Rachel’s arms remained by her side, and whatever her eyes were fixed upon was not in the room with them. Sam heard the bedroom door open, and her grandmother entered just as her mother began to pull away from her. Sam tried to hold on, but Rachel was too heavy. She fell from her daughter’s arms and dropped to the floor.

  66

  Parker hadn’t learned much from his conversation with Oscar Sansom, although he was reasonably content to dismiss, for now, a connection between Eklund’s interest in the mystery of Claudia Sansom’s disappearance and the private investigator’s own vanishing act. From what Sansom had told him, it sounded as though Eklund was in the process of disengaging from any real involvement in the case by the time he went missing, and his previous efforts appeared to have been tangential in the first place, as well as largely ineffective.

  In the meantime, he wished Oscar Sansom well. Sansom exhibited a peculiar combination of resignation and optimism: resignation to the likelihood that the years-long path his wife had taken from disappearance to death might never be revealed to him, and optimism that it might be possible to start again, or at least live out the rest of his days in the knowledge that his wife was no longer lost in this world.

  It was time, therefore, to forget Sansom, and move on to Michelle Souliere and Tobey Thayer, but even as he left Natick, Parker couldn’t shake a sense of disquiet. Why Claudia Sansom? he thought. Why should this case, of all others, have attracted Eklund’s interest?

  He thought that he might come back to the Sansom business, given time.

  Most of what Parker knew about Waterbury, Connecticut, could be summed up in two words: brass and watches. Brass manufacturing was the foundation of the city’s wealth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but that came to an end in the 1960s when Chase Brass moved its operations to Ohio. The watch industry grew alongside the brass, Waterbury being responsible for the manufacture of Robert Ingersoll’s one-dollar Yankee pocket watch in the late 1800s, and later the Mickey Mouse watch, too. An Asian company now owned the Ingersoll brand, which was, to a certain kind of person, an example of modern America’s problems in a nutshell.

  As with Sansom, Parker had called Michelle Souliere ahead of time to make sure she was willing to meet with him, using Ian Williamson as a reference if required. Souliere sounded interested, but asked him to give her a call when he was an hour out of town. She told him she had a busy schedule over the coming days and didn’t want to leave him waiting for too long, or be forced to wait on him in turn. Parker made the call when he reckoned he was about fifty minutes from Waterbury, but Souliere’s cell phone went straight to voice mail. He left a message, and tried again as he was entering Waterbury, with the same result.

  It was growing dark, and not only because the afternoon light was fading: gray clouds were moving in from the west, and more snow was forecast. It wouldn’t be heavy, but it would make driving a bitch for a while. Even if he managed to make contact with Souliere in the next hour, Parker didn’t think there would be much point in later inching his way through bad weather just to have to spend the night in some roadside motel. He decided he would find somewhere in Waterbury to spend the night and wait out the latest storm.

  Souliere lived in South End, a large neighborhood originally settled by French-Canadian immigrants, but their descendants now shared the area with a big Latin-American community, judging by the signs and storefronts Parker glimpsed as he drove through. He also saw a lot of empty factories and deserted lots, a reminder of how far Waterbury had fallen from its glory days.

  Souliere lived not far from St. Anne’s Church, in a two-story wood house that was neither the best nor the worst kept on the street. The paintwork was fresh enough not to be a blight, but not so new as to attract the attention of anyone looking for signs of obvious prosperity as a prelude to a burglary. The front porch was empty of junk, and a white fence surrounded the garden. Parker could see no lights burning inside, and there was no car in the drive. He parked outside and called Souliere’s cell phone a third time, but ended the connection as soon as he heard her voicemail message begin again. He drove downtown and took a room at the Marriott. He checked in with Angel and Louis, who were already most of the way to Greensburg, PA, home of Tobey Thayer. Like Parker, they’d decided that it was smarter to wait out the weather, and make better time in the morning. They were staying somewhere called the Prescott Inn on the New York-Pennsylvania border, in the Emily Dickinson Suite – or, as Angel put it, the ‘Depressed Poets Wing.’

  ‘We got a lot of chintz,’ he said. ‘Expensive chintz, but still chintz.’

  ‘How expensive?’

  ‘Four hundred bucks a night expensive, although we did also go for the champagne upgrade.’

  ‘Of course you would.’

  ‘Is that sarcasm?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘We figured Ross would want us to be comfortable. Where are you?’

  ‘Waterbury. In a Courtyard by Marriott.’

  ‘Ask for an upgrade.’

  ‘It’s a Marriott. They already gave me free water.’

  ‘Well, then you got no cause to complain.’

  Parker conceded that he had a point.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked Angel.

  ‘I’m worried about the direction our country is taking, and I hope rehab works for Sabathia or the Yankees will be another twenty-five million in the hole.’

  ‘Very funny. Your health, idiot.’

  ‘I’m okay. A little sore.’

  ‘Maybe you should have stayed in Maine.’

  ‘And done what, waited for summer? I need distraction. You hear any more about the Sam thing?’

  Parker told him the latest. Angel sympathized.

  ‘Moxie’s right,’ he said. ‘You have to keep your distance, and let him play your hand for you.’

  ‘I think I need distraction, too,’ said Parker. ‘It’s a mess.’

  ‘Look at it this way: if you require bodyguards every time you meet Sam, we can do it. Tell your lawyer to keep that card up his sleeve. It could be what wins the game.’

  Parker tried to imagine Rachel’s face if that was the best suggestion he could offer. It took some of the edge off his anger, and dulled the sadness.

  ‘I should be with you by tomorrow evening,’ he said. ‘When you get to Greensburg, see if you can shadow Thayer.’

  ‘Are you worried for him?’

  Parker had his cell phone on speaker. He glanced at the screen, but there was no sign of a response from Souliere.

  ‘Not yet,’ he replied, ‘but consider it a fluid situation.’

  67

  The Collector stood in the basement of Jaycob Eklund’s home, staring at the map and notes on the wall.

  He had gained entry by the simplest of expedients: repeatedly ac
tivating the alarm. The first time he did so, by shaking a window at the back of the house, it took just ten minutes for someone to arrive to investigate: a man in a gray BMW, whom the Collector recalled as being among those who had escorted Parker and his friends to their meeting with Mother. He checked the exterior of the house before entering and resetting the alarm. The Collector waited until he left, counted to twenty, then activated the alarm from the same window. The same man returned, made another circuit of the property, went into the house a second time, and returned to his car. He did not drive away immediately, but first made a call.

  When the Collector shook the window again, the alarm did not go off.

  Now, in the basement, he wondered what additional material Parker might have discovered and removed from there. He found it only slightly curious that Philip and Mother had not reclaimed what was taken. Presumably they had reached some accommodation with Parker, recognizing that his aims might equally serve their own, while remaining cautious enough to ensure that Eklund’s property continued to be secured. The Collector examined each location on the map, and read the details variously handwritten and typed beside them. From what he could gather, they represented a summary of information contained elsewhere, probably in the files acquired by Parker. Still, there was enough in the names and dates on the wall to enable the Collector to build a picture of Eklund’s thoughts, and suggest answers to some troubling questions, principal among them being why Donn Routh was so careful to conceal himself, and why his death had sent a ripple through the hollow brood that followed the Collector.

  The Collector was unfamiliar with the Brethren, and the name Peter Magus meant nothing to him. Before the night was out, he intended to fill both gaps in his knowledge. He made a cursory search of Eklund’s home before leaving, but found nothing else to interest him, and didn’t even bother to hide the evidence of his trespass. He dumped the contents of drawers on bedroom floors, and scattered paperwork across desks and chairs. It didn’t matter: Eklund would never be returning to this house, because Eklund was almost certainly dead.

  Parker ate at Diorio’s, an Italian restaurant on Bank that had been around, in one form or another, for almost a century. He tried Michelle Souliere twice more, but had no more luck than before. He didn’t know the woman, so he had no reason to sound the alarm just yet. There were all kinds of reasons why she might have her cell phone powered down, and their agreement to meet was relatively informal. He was still working on the McCartney biography he’d picked up in Portsmouth. McCartney was in a Japanese prison, and deeply regretting his attempt to bring a half-pound of marijuana into the country. Apart from being kind of dumb when it came to weed and Japan, Parker decided that the book hadn’t altered his opinion about McCartney much at all. He still liked him a lot.

  He walked back to his hotel after the meal, thinking that he wouldn’t sleep, but he was out as soon as his head hit the pillow. It wasn’t physical tiredness so much as emotional exhaustion, and he didn’t dream.

  Rachel Wolfe lay in a hospital bed at the University of Vermont Medical Center, feeling like an idiot. She’d tried to tell her parents, and later the emergency room doctor, that she had just fainted, and needed to rest, but the hospital insisted on keeping her under observation for at least one night. Sam’s hysterics made the whole incident more traumatic, and she had only become marginally calmer once it became clear her mom wasn’t about to die. Rachel tried to convince Sam that it wasn’t her fault, but she didn’t think the message was getting through. Reluctantly, Rachel agreed to let a pediatrician give Sam something to help her sleep. She hated the idea of medicating her child, but she was genuinely concerned about Sam. Sam wouldn’t, or couldn’t, stop crying.

  The TV in the room was dark. Rachel didn’t feel like watching anything. She had a book and some magazines by her bedside, but the thought of even looking at print made her dizzy. The attending physician had asked her if she was under any particular stress at the moment, and she couldn’t help but laugh. She warned her parents not to say anything to Parker about her collapse if he called, although she doubted he would. They were also under orders to keep Sam away from phones, just in case she took it upon herself to inform her father of this new development. Again, Rachel doubted that Sam would try to call Parker. She was ashamed of what had been said, and she wouldn’t want to share that shame with him.

  God, Rachel thought, every child is probably duty-bound to say I hate you to her parents at some point. I just thought we might get as far as adolescence before Sam did it.

  She had the strangest urge to discuss Sam with Parker. It was the kind of incident she would have shared with him had they been on better terms. But now the man with whom she instinctively wanted to speak about the child they had created together – the man with whom she had always spoken about such matters, even after they’d separated – was the last to whom she could turn.

  She wasn’t going to cry again. She’d cried enough for one day.

  She was about to settle down to sleep when she heard footsteps from the hallway outside her room. They were light, and fast. She glanced up and saw a child pass by, a girl with blond hair. She couldn’t have been more than five or six, and was barefoot. It was late. If she was a patient, what was she doing out of bed?

  ‘Hey,’ Rachel called. ‘Are you all right?’

  The footsteps stopped, but the girl did not reappear. Carefully, Rachel got out of bed and walked to the door.

  ‘Honey, I was—’

  The hallway was empty except for a nurse standing at the station, reading a file. She looked up when she saw Rachel.

  ‘Ms. Wolfe, can I help you with something?’

  ‘I saw a little girl pass by my door. I think she might be a patient.’

  The nurse shook her head.

  ‘You must have been dreaming. There are no children in this wing.’

  The nurse came to her and gently led her back to her bed.

  ‘I’m certain I saw a girl,’ said Rachel.

  ‘I was there,’ said the nurse, ‘and I didn’t see anyone but you.’

  Nevertheless, at Rachel’s insistence she agreed to check the adjoining rooms.

  ‘I told you,’ she said upon her return. ‘No children. Now try to sleep.’

  And after a time, Rachel did.

  Philip was drinking alone in a bar on Washington Street, in the part of Providence known as Downcity. The bar was old school; the music wasn’t loud and the TV above in the corner was on mute. Philip scratched at the crook of his left arm, where Lastrade had removed the blood to be couriered to New York, the final step in authenticating his claim to be Caspar Webb’s son. Lastrade professed to know what he was doing, but the needle hurt like fuck going in, and the skin around the hole was bruised and tender.

  A couple of students were sitting in a booth, drinking some overpriced foreign beer with a name Philip couldn’t even pronounce. His phone had rung three times since he started drinking, and he’d ignored it each time. He didn’t want to talk to Mother.

  He’d been bullshitting Lastrade when he said he was going to make some calls after the meeting with the Italians. He didn’t have anyone he could call. Bernardo and his people, for all the diminution of their power and position, were still men of influence: no other parties could offer the kind of score he needed to prove himself. Philip had been at the periphery of other deals over the years, and knew the names of half a dozen individuals who’d dealt with Webb, but they were all bit players, little fish. Only Mother had access to the names that mattered, and she wasn’t about to share those with her son. Without Lastrade’s connections, Philip wouldn’t even have been able to get to Bernardo and his people, and look how well that turned out.

  When he was halfway through his third drink, he began thinking about taking Mother up on her offer. He could go away for a while, live it up. When he returned, he’d be able to enjoy a life of comfort. He wouldn’t have to work, not if he didn’t want to. He could go to college, study something. He wa
s able to draw. His art teacher in high school had been convinced of his potential. He could apply to Rhode Island School of Design. If they turned him down, he might convince Mother to make a donation, see if that might change their mind.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said aloud, and one of the students turned and stared at him.

  ‘What are you looking at, bitch?’

  She turned away. He’d killed their conversation, though, that was for sure. Within a couple of minutes, they were gone.

  No, he wasn’t going to take Mother’s dime. If he did, he might as well just cut his own balls off and throw them in the river. The world would look at him like he was just a momma’s boy, and he was more, much more. Terry Nakem had learned that, right at the end; Vincent Garronne, too. They’d died within days of each other, both by his hand. He’d shown Mother what he could do, and it was more than just putting old men out of their misery. But did it make any difference to her?

  No, so whatever followed would be on her head.

  His phone started vibrating again. This time it wasn’t Mother calling, but Lastrade. He decided to pick up. Erik might want to join him. They could find a club, talk to some girls – proper local girls, not those stuck-up student whores. Philip didn’t have much interest in women, but he knew it would piss off Mother if he brought a girl back to their apartment.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Philip named the bar.

  ‘I’m coming to get you,’ said Lastrade.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Stevie got in touch with me. It’s on. You hear me? It’s on.’

  68

  Michelle Souliere was an unlikely debunker of psychics, ghost hunters, and apocalyptic conspiracy theorists. She loved fantasy and horror literature, and was an associate member of the Horror Writers Association and the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. That she was also a member of the American Humanist Association and the Skeptics Society caused her no difficulty whatsoever, as she was quite capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Just because something entertained her didn’t mean she had to believe in it. Actually, it was all the more entertaining if she didn’t.