The Woman in the Woods

by John Connolly

  “My father was a Jew,” said Maela. “He married a Gentile, so according to the Torah, I’m not Jewish, and I couldn’t be even if I wished it.”

  “And do you wish it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “My father was the only member of his family to survive the camps. He and my mother left just in time to avoid being rounded up.”

  “The rest must have been unlucky. My understanding is that a great many Italian Jews survived the Holocaust.”

  “And more than seven thousand died, so a great many didn’t.”

  Her interlocutor conceded the point with a regretful inclination of his head.

  “That kind of history,” he said, “might cause some to embrace their heritage, not reject it.”

  “We live in a despicable world. I don’t see any reason to give repellent men an excuse to hate me further.”

  “Why should they hate you at all?”

  “In my experience, being a woman is usually enough.”

  The man stared past her to the unseen figure behind.

  “I suspect my colleague might concur with that position.”

  “Was she the one who knocked me out?”

  “She was.”

  “Then you’ll understand if I could give a fuck about her opinion. What did she use on me?”

  “Chloroform.”

  “It’s nasty stuff.”

  “But not terminal.”

  “Does that come later?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “The outcome of our dialogue.”

  “What’s your name? I don’t favor discourse amid anonymity.”

  “You can call me Quayle.”

  “No first name?”

  “Not any longer. My turn at a question: Is it true that you help women in distress?”

  “I won’t deny it.”

  “Nor should you. It’s a noble vocation.”

  “You’re a patronizing individual, but I believe its endemic to your gender.”

  “I’m looking for someone who might have passed your way. Her name is Karis Lamb.”

  Maela Lombardi did not respond, either by word or alteration in expression.

  Quayle pressed her. “Is the name familiar to you?”

  “I can’t say that it is.”

  The slap to the right side of her head was so forceful and vicious that Maela felt something tear in her neck, and when she tried to straighten up, the pain made her cry out. She tasted bile in her mouth, and suddenly she was puking on herself and the carpet, and was ashamed even though she had no cause to be. She began to cry, and she didn’t want to cry, not in front of these people, not in front of anyone. She had spent her life trying to protect the vulnerable from the predatory. Women and children had found their way to safety through her. If the world were fair, then protection and safety would in turn have been offered to Maela in her time of need. But the world was not fair, because men ruled it.

  The woman went to the kitchen and returned with a damp towel, which she used to wipe Maela’s face and clean some of the filth from her sweater and skirt.

  “Do you know how I acquired this volume?” Quayle asked, once Maela had recovered a little of her composure.

  Maela squinted at the cover, and caught the name in the title: Marcus Aurelius. “I found it on Errol Dobey’s shelves,” Quayle continued, “just before my colleague punctured one of his eyes. Dobey then began speaking more freely, but he could just as easily have done so with both eyes intact. And because I was disappointed with him for making us resort to such savagery, we burned his book collection to ashes and consigned his body to the same flames. Finally, we paid a visit to his girlfriend, Esther Bachmeier, and took her for a ride. She died more unpleasantly than Dobey, and all because he couldn’t answer a straight question. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “So: Karis Lamb.”

  “Karis Lamb is dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  Maela spat a fragment of old food from her mouth.

  “You ought to watch more TV.”

  CHAPTER

  XLI

  History echoes, history rhymes.

  Parker’s grandfather, who spent most of his adult life in the uniform of a Maine state trooper, had witnessed the immediate aftermath of life’s dissolution in many forms: highway collisions; assaults leading to fatality; expirations in sleep, on the street, over dinner; hunting accidents; suicide; and murder. The old man gave long consideration to the actions of mortality, and the conclusion he reached was that the moment of a man’s passing was not written at the time of his birth, and Death possessed no stratagem. Death was a being of expediency; it had no need to deviate excessively from its path to find quarry. Humanity drifted in and out of striking distance, and if Death missed its mark the first time, the dupe would eventually come around again, and Death would barely have to exert itself to strike the terminal blow. Death was patient. Death was inexhaustible.

  But Death also liked patterns. Death had its own cadence.

  And so it was that Jasper Allen, who had faced down Gillick and Audet as they raced for the Canadian border, and welcomed a shard of masonry into his flesh for his troubles; Jasper Allen, who bore the name of his sire, and grandsire, and great-grandsire, back to a Jasper Allen who fought at the siege of Fort St. George in December 1723, when the Abenaki surrounded the Thomaston stockade on Christmas Day and kept it under continuous assault for thirty days thereafter, only for that Jasper Allen, the first of his line, to lose his life a few months later, when the Abenaki trapped the whaling boats of Captain Winslow and Sergeant Harvey and butchered every white man they found; Jasper Allen—father, husband—who, after the birth of three daughters, had at last been gifted a son to whom he might pass on the eponym of his forebears; Jasper Allen, state trooper, heard Death’s meter, and danced unconsciously to it.

  Allen was barely fifteen minutes from home when he pulled over a Honda Civic Coupe that was tearing up the blacktop on the road to Lagrange. The two young men inside were Dale Putnam and Gary Newhouse, although this would not become known until much later, just as it would not be clear why events transpired as they did until all but one of those involved were dead. Putnam had an outstanding warrant for probation violation and theft by deception. This in itself would have been enough to land him back in the county jail had he and Newhouse not also been transporting four hundred bundles of heroin in the trunk of the Honda, each bundle consisting of ten bags. They’d managed to strike a good deal on the heroin down in New York: $30 per bundle, or $12,000 for the batch, which in Maine could be sold for at least $15 per bag. So in return for their initial outlay, Putnam and Newhouse were guaranteed to turn a profit of $48,000, of which they’d have to kick back $18,000 to the guy who had fronted them the money, leaving them with $15,000 each to reinvest in heroin. This they fully intended to do, because Maine was just one big vein waiting to be fed: Newhouse personally knew three guys who were using five hundred bags a week, ten bags per shot.

  So what they did not need was for some Herman Munster motherfucker dressed in blue to pull them over because they were doing maybe ten miles above the limit, especially with Putnam—who was behind the wheel—also coming down from a meth high, and thus on the verge of tweaking. All of which went some way toward explaining why, as he handed over his license, Putnam saw fit to pull a Hi-Point C9 and shoot Jasper Allen through the underside of the jaw, killing him instantly. The two men then dumped the body in the bushes, and in an effort to sabotage the dashboard cam and the hard drive in the trunk, set fire to the cruiser before driving to the outskirts of Lincoln. There they hid the Honda in the garage of a run-down property that had been on the market for long enough to suggest it would never sell, and walked to a fast-food restaurant from which they called for a ride from their money man, to whom they initially decided to say nothing about the killing of a state trooper.

  Putnam had been born on the sa
me day as the late Ryan Gillick, and Newhouse came from the same town as Bertrand Audet. But again, these coincidences would only emerge over the days and weeks that followed. The immediate effect of Allen’s death—other than to leave a woman widowed, and four children without a father—was to cause the cancellation of the press conference called for the following day, and the withdrawal of most of the MSP evidence team from the dig site.

  And Death, insatiable, marched on.

  CHAPTER

  XLII

  Quayle moved his chair closer to Maela Lombardi, so near that they might have spoken in whispers and still have been intelligible to each other. As with Errol Dobey, it lent the discourse a strange intimacy, one destined to be reinforced by the act with which it must inevitably conclude: the penetration to come, the yielding of the flesh to fatal invasion, that for now remained unacknowledged by both parties.

  “You appear very certain it’s Karis they’ve found,” said Quayle.

  “The timing is right,” Maela replied. “And how many mothers of newborns do you think are buried out in those woods?”

  “I couldn’t possibly say. But you might be lying.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To protect her.”

  “I think she was already long past protection by the time she came to me. She’d given up hope for herself. It was the baby she wanted to save.”

  “She told you this?”

  “She didn’t have to.”

  Quayle looked to the woman with him. Maela caught a hint of some private exchange, a silent understanding, and realized that her interpretation of the situation was flawed. This wasn’t just about Karis, or the baby. But if not, then what else could it be?

  “So Dobey and Bachmeier sent her to you?”

  “By way of another staging post.”

  “Did they inform you she was coming?”

  “Esther said she might be.”

  “What did they share with you of her predicament?”

  “Nothing, except that Karis was in trouble, and was certain someone would be coming after her, someone bad.”

  “The father of the child?”

  “That’s what Esther assumed. Are you the father of the child?”

  “No, I am not.”

  “But here you are. Therefore Esther’s assumption was wrong.”

  Quayle shook a finger at her in what might have been mistaken for a good-natured warning.

  “I fear you’re playing semantic games. Perhaps you’d like Pallida to strike you again—or, in common with the late Errol Dobey, you’re curious to find out what the world looks like when seen through one eye.”

  Maela took a deep breath.

  “I want neither.”

  “Then give me straight answers. What did Karis tell you?”

  “She told me that the father of the baby was an occultist, and an abuser of women and children. She said that what she’d taken from him would destroy him. Those were her exact words. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t press her on it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that wasn’t my role. I was her guardian, however briefly, not her interrogator.”

  “You can’t have guarded her very well if she ended up in a shallow grave.”

  Maela winced. The barb stuck, but it didn’t take her long to shake off its sting. When she had done so, her gaze seemed keener than before, and she looked on Quayle more in disappointment than disgust, as once she might have regarded a schoolchild who used an inappropriate word in her presence.

  “That was unworthy, even of you,” she said.

  “You don’t know me well enough to make that judgment, yet I concede you may be right. I withdraw the remark. In return, you might try to explain how a young woman who came to you for help now lies in a morgue after many years in the ground.”

  “She wouldn’t stay,” said Maela. Her voice trembled, but on this occasion she was not ashamed to show emotion. It was no sign of weakness: she was right to feel sorrow for Karis and her lost child, and with this came guilt at her own failings. Maela had been unable to persuade Karis to remain with her. Two nights was as long as Karis would allow herself to rest. That was how scared she was of those who might come after her. Now, gazing upon this interloper in her home, Maela appreciated that Karis had been wise to be scared.

  Because Maela decided that Quayle, either by nature or inclination, was not quite human.

  “But you must have passed her along to someone else, just as Dobey and Bachmeier entrusted her to you.”

  “I gave her some names,” Maela admitted. She wiped away a tear. “She was planning to go to Canada, and I had contacts in Quebec and New Brunswick.”

  “But not elsewhere in Maine?”

  “No. She didn’t want to tarry here.”

  Quayle took all this in, then turned to Mors.

  “Well?”

  “I think we should blind her,” said Mors.

  “I think so, too.”

  “No!” The word emerged as a scream from Maela’s throat, more like the cry of a bird than any mortal sound. “Please, I’m telling you the truth. I drove her to the bus station, and she bought tickets for three different destinations: Bangor, Montreal, and Fredericton, New Brunswick. She then asked me to leave, so I wouldn’t know which route she’d taken.”

  “Didn’t she trust you to keep her secrets?”

  “Not if faced with someone like you.”

  Quayle sat back in the chair. The volume of Marcus Aurelius had remained in his left hand throughout, and now he stroked it with the fingers of his right, like a kitten curled.

  “You are a formidable woman, Ms. Lombardi,” he said. “I really do admire you a great deal.”

  “But not enough to let me live,” said Maela.

  She could no longer tell if she was crying for Karis or herself, for both or for all: for every frightened, bruised, and tortured woman or girl who had ever come to her seeking help and consolation. And who would take her place after she was gone? There would always be too few people in this world who cared enough to put themselves at risk for the sake of strangers, and too many who sought to inflict pain on the familiar and nameless alike.

  “No,” said Quayle, “not enough for that.”

  “Then damn you both to hell.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Quayle, even as Mors drifted from her perch to circle and descend. “But I promise it won’t hurt.”

  And it did not.

  CHAPTER

  XLIII

  Parker attended the funeral of Jasper Allen. The little Methodist chapel was so full that the mourners spilled out into the spring sunshine, and the service was broadcast to the assembly via a hurriedly arranged system of loudspeakers. Representatives from police departments in New England and beyond came to pay tribute, so Parker knew a lot of the faces. He spoke with some of those in attendance, including Gordon Walsh, but otherwise kept his distance. He had nothing to offer. He had met Allen only once, and liked him. That was all there was to it.

  The service was simple: some hymns, a sermon, and a eulogy from the Colonel of the Maine State Police, who had known Allen personally. They had both grown up in Millinocket, only a year apart in age. Fatalities among Maine state troopers while on duty were rare; Parker thought they might amount to double figures, but just barely, and of those Allen was only the third or fourth to be killed by gunfire. Lawmen never became inured to the deaths of their own, even in the most violent of cities, but the shock was always greater in a state like Maine, which ranked among the lowest in the Union for rates of violent crime, generally slugging it out with Vermont for the honor.

  Parker listened to the colonel’s words, and watched a blackbird picking at a patch of damp soil in the shadow of the chapel. It was the first blackbird he’d seen that year. Typically they didn’t return to the state until later in March, closely followed by turkey vultures, then the robins and sparrows in early April. To know birds was to know seasons; another aspect of life here that Parker had
learned from his grandfather. The long winter silence of the woods, fields, and marshes was being broken by avian song at last.

  The service ended. Parker did not linger, nor did he head to the cemetery. He didn’t want to see Allen’s weeping wife again, or stare upon his shocked children. He’d witnessed grief too often to wish to carry the burden of it without necessity, or indulge in any voyeuristic partaking in the misery of others.

  The car used by Allen’s killers had been found burned out the night before. Parker gleaned from Walsh that a witness—a woman named Letty Ouellette—had come forward to claim that her boyfriend had picked up two men on the evening of the shooting, not far from where the car was discovered, and brought them home. Both of the new arrivals appeared nervous, and she overheard a subsequent conversation about a gun, although she didn’t pick up any further details because she was exiled upstairs to watch TV and mind her own business.

  The boyfriend, who went by the extravagant name of Hebron Caldicott—Heb to his associates—made a living buying and selling used vehicles, and Ouellette thought the make and model of the burned-out car sounded similar to one that had, until recently, been taking up space in the lot adjoining their property. She had also indicated, albeit reluctantly, that Heb Caldicott subsidized his income from the motor industry by distributing OxyContin, crystal meth, and cocaine, and had recently expanded into heroin.

  All this Ouellette elected to share with the police because Caldicott, with whom she’d been living for the past eight months, had suggested that she might like to sleep with “Dale,” and maybe “Gary,” too, in order to calm them down and keep them distracted while Caldicott went out to take care of some urgent business. When Ouellette responded that she had no intention of fucking two transients just to keep them occupied—or for any other reason—good old Heb Caldicott, who seemed pretty overwrought himself to Ouellette, punched her so hard that she briefly lost consciousness. When she came to, Caldicott informed her that she’d fuck whomever he told her to fuck, and she ought to start making herself pretty for his friends, because they were going to spend time with her whether she liked it or not. He then locked Ouellette in the bedroom, at which point she decided their relationship had come to its natural conclusion, and the best thing would be to climb out a window and seek accommodation elsewhere.