As if on cue, Lawrie Harmon glanced in our direction and managed to eke an extra quarter of an inch out of her smile. Her husband, who was sitting at the head of the table, patted her left hand reflexively, the way he might have petted a dog. But for a moment, I thought some of the dullness disappeared from her eyes, and something lanced through the fog, like a camera lens fixing on the perfect moment of clarity before an exposure. For the first time that night, her gaze lingered, but only on Nyoko. Then the smile leveled out slightly, and her attention moved on. Nyoko hadn’t noticed, distracted as she was by something Summer had said to her, although I wondered if she would even have registered the change, had she been watching.
Harmon nodded to one of the waiters who stood like white compass points in a circle around us, and dishes began to appear before us with quiet efficiency. There were still two empty chairs at the end of the table.
“Are we missing someone, Joel?” asked Jacobs. He had a reputation as someone who, given half a chance, would declaim endlessly about his own status as a visionary, someone who was in touch with nature and the grandeur of the ordinary man. Clearly, he’d sized up the rest of us and figured that we were going to be no competition, but he didn’t want some unknown quantity arriving and upstaging him. His beard twitched, as though something living within it had briefly shifted position, then he was distracted by the arrival of his duck terrine and commenced eating instead of wondering.
Harmon looked at the chairs, as if noticing them for the first time.
“Our children,” he said. “We had hoped that they might join us, but you know how kids are. There’s a party down at the yacht club. No offense meant to anyone here, but I think they decided that it provided more opportunities for mischief than a dinner with the folks and their guests. Now, please eat.”
It came a little late for Jacobs, who was already halfway through. To his credit, he paused awkwardly, then did a little shrug and continued working on the terrine. The food was good, although terrine of anything tended to leave me unimpressed. The main course of venison was fine, though, served as a navarin with juniper berries. There was a mousse of chocolate and lime for dessert, and coffee with petits fours to finish. The wine was a Duhard-Milon ’98, which Harmon described as costaud, or powerfully built, from one of the lesser Lafitte properties. Jacobs nodded sagely like he understood what Harmon was talking about. I sipped at my glass to be polite. It tasted a little rich for my blood, in every sense.
The conversation moved from local politics to art and, inevitably, to literature, the latter largely a result of Jacobs’s intervention, at which point he began to preen as he waited for someone to inquire about his latest magnum opus. Nobody seemed very keen to open the floodgates, but in the end Harmon asked, apparently more out of a sense of duty than any real interest. Judging from the summary that followed, Jacobs had not yet tired of mythologizing the common man, even if he had yet to get around to either understanding him or liking him.
“That man,” June whispered, as the plates were cleared and the guests began to move through a pair of double doors into a room furnished with comfortable chairs and couches, “is the most insufferable bore.”
“Someone gave me one of his books once,” I replied.
“Did you read it?”
“Started it, then figured I’d want the time back on my deathbed and I wouldn’t get it. I managed to lose the book instead. I think I dropped it in the sea.”
“A wise decision.”
Harmon appeared at my elbow.
“How about that tour, Mr. Parker? June, will you accompany us?”
June demurred. “We’ll only start fighting, Joel. I’ll let your new guest enjoy your collection without being bothered by my prejudices.”
He bowed to her, then turned back to me. “Can I offer you another drink, Mr. Parker?”
I lifted my half-finished wine. “I’m good, thank you.”
“Well, let’s proceed, then.”
We moved from room to room, Harmon pointing out pieces of which he was particularly proud. I didn’t recognize many of the names, but that was probably due more to my ignorance than anything else. I couldn’t say that much of Harmon’s collection was to my taste, though, and I could almost hear June’s expressions of dismay at some of the more outlandish additions.
“I hear you have a number of pieces by Daniel Clay,” I said, as we gazed at something that might have been a sunset or a suture.
Harmon grinned.
“June told me that you might ask after them,” he said. “I have two in a back office. Some of the others are in storage. I have a revolving collection, you might say. Too many pieces and too little space, even in a house this size.”
“Did you know him well?”
“We were at college together, and we kept in touch after graduation. He was a guest here on many occasions. I liked him a lot. He was a sensitive man. What happened was just terrible, both for him and for the children involved.”
He led me to a room at the back of the house, with high, recessed windows looking out over the sea. It was a combination of office and small library, with floor-to-ceiling oak shelves and an enormous matching desk. Harmon told me that Nyoko used it on the days when she was working in the house. There were only two paintings on the walls, one perhaps two feet by five feet, the other much smaller. The latter depicted a church steeple set against a backdrop of receding pines. It was hazy, the edges dulled, as though the whole scene was being filtered through a Vaseline-smeared lens. The larger painting showed the bodies of men and women writhing together, so that the canvas was a mass of twisting, shadowy flesh. It was startlingly unpleasant, more so because of the degree of artistry that had gone into its creation.
“I think I prefer the landscape,” I said.
“Most people do. The landscape is a later work, perhaps created two decades after the other. Both are untitled, but the larger canvas is typical of Daniel’s earlier work.”
I turned my attention back to the landscape. There was something almost familiar about the shape of the steeple.
“Is this a real place?” I asked.
“It’s Gilead,” said Harmon.
“As in the ‘children of Gilead ’?”
Harmon nodded. “Another of the dark spots on our state’s history. That’s why I keep it back here. I suppose I hold on to it more out of tribute to Daniel’s memory and the fact that he gave it to me than anything else, but it’s not something I’d want displayed in the more public areas of the house.”
The community of Gilead, named after one of the biblical cities of refuge, had been founded in the fifties by a minor timber baron named Bennett Lumley. Lumley was a God-fearing man, and he worried about the spiritual well-being of the men who worked in the forests below the Canadian border. He thought that if he could establish a town in which they and their families could live, a town without the distraction of booze and whores, then he could keep them on the straight and narrow. He instituted a building program, the most conspicuous element of which was a massive stone church designed to act as the centerpiece of the settlement, a symbol of its citizens’ devotion to the Lord. Gradually, the houses Lumley had built began to fill with timber workers and their families, some of whom were probably genuinely committed to a community based on Christian principles.
Unfortunately, not all of them felt the same way. Rumors began to emerge about Gilead, and about some of the things that went on there in the dark of night, but those were different times, and there was little that the police could do, especially as Lumley hampered any investigations, anxious to preserve the façade of his ideal community.
Then, in 1959, a hunter tracking deer through the woods near Gilead came across a shallow grave that had been partially disturbed by animals. The corpse of a newborn child was revealed: a boy, barely a day old when he died. He had been stabbed repeatedly with, it was later surmised, a knitting needle. Two other similar graves were later found nearby, each holding a small corpse, one mal
e and one female. This time, the police arrived in force. Questions were asked; gentle and notso-gentle interrogations took place, but a number of the adults who had been living at the settlement had already fled by that stage. Three girls, one aged fourteen and two aged fifteen, were examined by doctors and found to have given birth to children in the previous twelve months. Lumley was forced to act. Meetings were convened, and influential men spoke to one another in the corners of clubs. Quietly, and without fuss, Gilead was abandoned and the buildings were either destroyed or began to fall into decay, all but the great, unfinished church, which was gradually colonized by the forest, its steeple turning to a pillar of green beneath layers of twisting ivy. Only one person was jailed in connection with what had occurred: a man named Mason Dubus, who was regarded as the senior figure in the community. He served time for child abduction and sex with a minor, after one of the girls who had given birth told police she had been a virtual prisoner of Dubus and his wife for seven years, having been taken from near her family home in West Virgina while out picking berries. Dubus’s wife escaped jail by claiming that she had been coerced into all that had occurred by her husband, and it was her evidence that helped to secure his conviction. She declined, or was unable, to tell the police anything more of what had taken place at Gilead, but it was clear from the testimony of some of the children, both male and female, that they had been subjected to continuous and sustained abuse both before and during the establishment of the Gilead settlement. It was, as Harmon had said, a dark chapter in the state’s history.
“Did Clay create many paintings like this one?” I asked.
“Clay didn’t create many paintings, period,” replied Harmon, “but of those that I’ve seen, a number certainly contain images of Gilead.”
Gilead had been situated just outside Jackman, and Jackman was where Clay’s car had been found abandoned. I reminded Harmon of that fact.
“I think Gilead was certainly an interest of Daniel’s,” he said cautiously.
“An interest, or more than that?”
“Do you mean was Daniel obsessed by Gilead? I don’t think so, but given the nature of his own work, it’s hardly surprising that he was curious about its history. He interviewed Dubus, you know. He told me about it. Daniel had an idea for a project concerning Gilead, I think.”
“A project?”
“Yes, a book about Gilead.”
“Was that the term he used? ‘Project’?”
Harmon thought for a moment. “I couldn’t say for sure, but it might have been.” He finished the last of his brandy and set the glass down on his desk. “I’m afraid I’m neglecting my other guests. We should return to the fray.”
He opened the door, allowed me to pass, then closed and locked it behind us.
“What do you think happened to Daniel Clay?” I asked him, the buzz of conversation from the other guests growing louder as we drew nearer to the room in which they were gathered.
Harmon stopped at the door.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can tell you this, though: Daniel wasn’t the kind of man to commit suicide. He might have blamed himself for what happened to those children, but he wouldn’t have killed himself over it. Yet if he was still alive, I believe he would have made contact with someone in the years since his disappearance, either with me or his daughter, or one of his colleagues. He hasn’t, though, not once.”
“Then you think he’s dead?”
“I believe he was killed,” Harmon corrected me. “I just have no idea why.”
Chapter XII
The party, if that was the right word for it, broke up shortly after ten. I spent most of the time in the company of June, Summer, and Nyoko, trying to sound like I knew a little about art, and failing, and considerably less time with Jacobs and two of the bankers, trying to sound like I knew a little about finance, and failing there too. Jacobs, the people’s writer, was very knowledgeable about high-risk bonds and currency speculation for someone who claimed to have the common touch. His hypocrisy was so blatant as to be almost admirable, in a way.
Slowly, the guests began to drift toward their cars. Harmon stood on his porch, despite the fact that it had grown suddenly colder, and thanked each of us for coming. His wife had disappeared after wishing us a polite good night. Nyoko was excluded from her farewells, and once again I was aware that, despite appearances, Lawrie Harmon was not quite as disengaged from the real world as the young Asian-American believed.
When it came to my turn to leave, Harmon placed his left hand upon my upper arm as his right hand gripped mine.
“You tell Rebecca that if there’s anything I can do for her, she just has to let me know,” he said. “There are a lot of people who would like to find out what happened to Daniel.” His face darkened, and his voice dropped in volume. “And not just his friends,” he added.
I waited for him to continue. He had a taste for the enigmatic.
“At the end, before he disappeared, Daniel changed,” Harmon went on. “It wasn’t just his troubles: the Muller case, the revelations of abuse. There was something else. He was certainly preoccupied the last time I saw him. Perhaps it was research, but what sort of research could have left him shaken in that way?”
“When did you last see him?”
“A week or so before he went missing.”
“And he gave you no indication of what was bothering him, his known difficulties apart?”
“None. It was just an impression that I got.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this back in your office?”
Harmon shot me a look that told me he wasn’t used to his decisions being questioned.
“I’m a careful man, Mr. Parker. I play chess, and I’m pretty good at it. It’s probably why I was a good businessman too. I’ve learned that it pays to take a little time to think before making a move. Back in the office, part of me wanted nothing more to do with Daniel Clay. He was my friend, but after what happened, after the rumors and the whispered allegations, I felt that it was best to distance myself from him.”
“But now you’ve changed your mind.”
“No, I haven’t. Part of me suspects that no good can come of your nosing around in this, but if it uncovers the truth about Daniel and lays the suspicions to rest, and gives his daughter some peace of mind along the way, then it could be that you’ll prove me wrong.”
He released his grip upon my hand and my arm. It seemed that we were done. Harmon was watching the writer’s car pull out of its parking slot on the driveway. It was an old Dodge truck-it was said that he drove a Mercedes back in Massachusetts, where he kept an apartment near Harvard-and Jacobs maneuvered it like it was a Panzer tank. Harmon shook his head in baffled amusement.
“You mentioned some others who might be interested in what happened to Clay, people apart from his friends or acquaintances.”
Harmon didn’t look at me.
“Yes. It’s not hard to figure out. There are people who believe that Daniel colluded in the abuse of children. I have two children. I know what I would do to anyone who harmed them, or anyone who allowed others to do so.”
“And what would that be, Mr. Harmon?”
He tore himself away from Jacobs’s increasingly frantic attempts to make a turn unaided by power steering.
“I’d kill him,” he said, and there was something in the way he said it, something so matter-of-fact, that I didn’t doubt him, not for one moment. I knew then that for all of his bonhomie, all of his fine wines and his pretty pictures, Joel Harmon was a man who would not hesitate to crush those who crossed him. And I wondered, for a moment, if Daniel Clay might not have been such a person, and if Joel Harmon’s interest in him was not entirely benign. Before I had a chance to follow that train of thought any further, Nyoko came over and whispered something in Harmon’s ear.
“Are you sure?” Harmon said.
She nodded.
Harmon immediately called to those who had reached their cars to stop. Russell, the shrink, pa
tted the hood of Jacobs’s truck, indicating that he should cut the engine. Jacobs looked almost relieved to do so.
“It seems that there is an intruder in the grounds,” he said. “It might be best if you all stepped into the house for a moment, just to be safe.”
Everyone did as Harmon asked, albeit with some grumbling from Jacobs, who clearly felt a poem coming on and was anxious to commit it to paper before it was lost to posterity; that, or he was trying to hide his embarrassment at screwing up a simple turn. We all shuffled back into the library. Jacobs and Summer went to one of the windows and looked out on the expanse of neatly mown lawn at the back of the house.
“I can’t see anyone,” said Jacobs.
“Maybe we should stay away from the windows,” said Summer.
“He’s an intruder, not a sniper,” said Russell.
Summer didn’t seem convinced. Jacobs placed a reassuring arm around her shoulders and let it linger there. She didn’t object. What was it with poets, I wondered? It seemed that there was a certain type of woman who just buckled at the suggestion of an internal rhyme.
Harmon’s driver, housekeeper, and maid all lived in quarters adjoining the main house. The waiters, who were huddled together like startled doves, had been hired for the evening, and the cook lived in Portland and commuted to the house each day. The driver, whose name was Todd, joined us in the hallway. He was dressed casually in jeans and a shirt. He wore a leather jacket over the shirt and was carrying a gun. It was a Smith amp;Wesson nine-millimeter in a glitzy finish, but he held it in a way that suggested he knew how to use it.
“Mind if I tag along?” I asked Harmon.
“I don’t mind at all,” he said. “It’s probably nothing, but best to be sure.”
We walked through to the kitchen, where the cook and the maid were standing by a sink, staring out at the grounds through the little window above it.
“What is all this about?” asked Harmon.
“Maria saw someone,” said the cook. She was an attractive older woman, her dark hair tied back and covered with a white cap, her body lean and athletic. The maid was Mexican, and also slim and good-looking. Joel Harmon clearly allowed aesthetics to influence his hiring procedures.
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