The Woman in the Woods

by John Connolly

  She left him alone again. He went to the fireplace and examined the framed photographs on the mantel. A younger Leila featured in many of them, often alongside a heavyset man who had started going bald early, tried to disguise it, and finally surrendered to the inevitable before he vanished entirely from the gallery, as though fate, not content with taking his hair, had decided to appropriate the rest of him as well; and a short, dark-haired woman who started out thin and kept getting thinner until there were no more pictures of her at all, freezing her at a stage before her illness became her most pronounced feature. Judging by how old her daughter looked in the most recent photo, Parker guessed that the final pictures of Patton’s mother might have been taken four or five years earlier, perhaps even about the time Karis passed through Cadillac on her way to a death in the Maine woods.

  “She doesn’t like to look at them.”

  Patton had entered the room behind him, carrying a tray with a pot of Chinese design, two small matching cups, and a plate of cookies that were clearly home-baked. She put the tray down on a low table before joining him at the fireplace.

  “My mom, I mean. She doesn’t like to be reminded of how she used to be, but I do.”

  Parker didn’t say that he was sorry. After so many years of looking after her mother, Leila Patton had probably heard every platitude in existence.

  “How long can you keep caring for her at home?” he asked.

  “A few more months.” She spoke matter-of-factly, but wouldn’t look directly at him. “After that she’ll need full-time attention, until the end.”

  “Is there somewhere nearby?”

  “Not really, or nowhere I’d want her to be. We’ll have to sell the house to cover the expenses, but I wasn’t planning on staying here anyway.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Eventually? Somewhere with a view. But first, Bloomington: the Jacobs School of Music, if they’ll still have me. I was offered a scholarship a while back, but I couldn’t accept it because of how sick my mom was. It’s being held for me. Or it was. I’m almost afraid to ask now.”

  “Is Jacobs good?”

  She laughed.

  “Good? Jacobs is the best in the country, even better than Berklee or Juilliard, although the Curtis in Philadelphia runs pretty close.”

  “Let me guess,” said Parker. “Piano.”

  “I can see why you’re a detective. What gave it away, I wonder?”

  “The flattening to your fingertips,” said Parker.

  Patton instinctively looked at her hands.

  “But mainly that big piano in the corner.”

  “Witty,” said Patton. “Just like the detectives in books.”

  She poured the tea, and they ate a cookie each. Patton sat on the couch, and Parker took an armchair while he tried to explain to her why she should trust him. She listened, and when she asked questions he did his best to answer them honestly. When he didn’t want to answer, he let her know. He had no desire to lie to her.

  To all this he consented because he believed the young woman before him had something she wished to share, and perhaps of which she needed to unburden herself. And even if what he learned did not aid him in his investigation, and he succeeded only in relieving her of its weight, this would be sufficient, because sometimes the service asked of us is just to listen. Only later did Parker understand that in this room colored by dying, he had laid himself bare before a stranger, and by doing so had decreased the measure of his own pain.

  Parker finished talking. Leila—for she was Leila to him now, and Leila she would always remain—touched Parker’s hand, and in establishing that connection, she spoke.

  “Lamb,” she said. “That was Karis’s second name, but she told me to keep it secret.”

  Leila got up and left the room again. When she returned, she was holding a shoe box, which she placed on the coffee table.

  “Karis,” she said, “told me to keep lots of things secret.”

  CHAPTER

  XCV

  Quayle was waiting for Mors when she returned, the killings of recent hours lending a temporary warmth to her pallor, as though in depriving others of life she had absorbed a little of their vigor to compensate for the paucity of her own.

  Quayle knew her requirements by now. He had laid out a sheet of plastic just inside the door on which Mors stood to shed her clothing, until she was naked before him. Only then did she step from the plastic and carefully gather up the ends of the sheet, knotting them together to form a neat package. Later she would soak the contents in bleach before dumping them. Burning would have been preferable, but they were concerned about the smoke drawing attention to the cabin.

  Mors showered before dressing in fresh clothes. Quayle, lost in thought, had still not moved from his chair by the time she was finished. Mors did not disturb him, but curled up on a couch and fell instantly asleep.

  Quayle was very close to what he had been seeking for so long, but the temptation to bring it to an end with alacrity had to be tempered with caution. He did not wish to be the quarry in a manhunt when all this was done, or not before he had safely left this place to return to England.

  How soon before the bodies of Mullis, White, and the rest were found? Not long, he supposed. He had no fear that Mors might have been seen in the immediate vicinity of either the house or the trailer—she was too good for that—but one could not account for every possibility, and there was always the small chance that someone might recall an unfamiliar vehicle glimpsed on the road. It would be best if Mors abandoned her car. Giller had sourced two for them, guaranteed clean, and one would suffice for what remained to be done.

  Since Holly Weaver worked long hours, and the boy was at school, their home stood empty for most of the day. Owen Weaver was a problem, since his own property was so close to his daughter’s, but he had to go out sometime. If he didn’t, they would deal with him; nevertheless, it would be better if they could find what they wanted, take it, and vanish without leaving any more bodies behind. The greater the carnage, the greater the likelihood of being caught, and they had already ended enough lives. There had been no choice when it came to the others, but Quayle could see no reason to inflict harm on the Weavers, or none beyond a vague desire for retribution, and that would be assuaged as soon as he had what he wanted.

  And then there was Parker to consider, because he was also searching for Karis Lamb’s son. With Giller gone, there was no way of finding out how close Parker might be, but Quayle had made provisions for his distraction. They might require one more body, although thankfully Mors’s enthusiasm for killing appeared quite inexhaustible.

  She really was, Quayle thought, the most remarkable woman.

  4

  We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. . . . In this war, we know, books are weapons.

  —Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)

  CHAPTER

  XCVI

  The shoe box remained on the coffee table, but Leila made no move to display its contents. In Parker’s opinion, she possessed an admirable sense of theater.

  “I liked Karis,” said Leila. “In another life, we might have been friends. But we didn’t have time for that. She was here, and then she was gone.”

  “Weren’t you concerned when she left and you received no further communication from her?” Parker asked.

  “No. She warned me that it was how it would be—how it had to be. Because of the man she was running from, and what she’d done to him.”

  “Who was he, this man?”

  “Karis called him Vernay. I don’t know his first name, and Karis told me not to go searching for more information about him, not even on the Internet. Dobey knew more, but not much, and what he had, he didn’t share with me.”

  “And did you go looking into Vernay?”

  “Of course, but not until later: months, maybe a year, after Karis left. Inquisitiveness, you know?
”

  “And?”

  “There were more Vernays than I’d expected, but I knew the one I wanted was a book collector, so I started browsing forums and blogs. I was careful. I set up a new e-mail account to log on, and used only a Tor browser to make myself hard to trace. One evening, I opened my e-mail and there was a new message in my in-box, from a no-reply address. It read, “Why are you searching for Vernay?” It came with a photograph attached: a picture of a child, a girl no more than three or four years old. Naked. Dead. I deleted the account, and stopped looking. I think Vernay disappeared, though. There was chatter about it on some of the forums before all references to him ceased, and all the old postings were expunged, like everyone had been told to keep quiet.”

  “You didn’t share this with anyone else?”

  “No. I’d made a mistake. I didn’t want to compound my error by bringing these people to our door.”

  Parker thought Leila Patton was quite something.

  “What did Karis tell you about her time with Vernay?” he asked.

  “Not a lot. He started out gentle, she said. That’s what Karis couldn’t understand. She felt stupid, but she wouldn’t be the first woman to have been fooled by a man. By the time she found out what he was really like—the pornography, how he enjoyed watching children being hurt—it was too late. She was pregnant, and he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. She was certain he’d kill her once the baby was born. He never threatened her that way, but she knew. It was the child he wanted.

  “And he had this weird taste in books: occult stuff—not novels or stories, but old volumes. Grimoires, they’re called. He told Karis he knew more about them than anyone else in the country, perhaps even the world. He would receive mail from all over, addressed only to ‘M. Vernay,’ and men would come and visit him because he was such an expert, but they weren’t the type to help a pregnant woman. They were the kind that shared Vernay’s interests, and not just in mysticism: they would view films together on a screen in Vernay’s library, and exchange electronic files containing images of torture. They liked pain. By that point, Vernay didn’t care what Karis did or didn’t know about his tastes. He was done pretending.

  “Then, in her final trimester, she detected a change in him. He was excited. He started selling parts of his collection, trying to bring in money. Karis thought negotiations might be taking place in the background, because there were phone calls and arguments. Finally Vernay locked her in the basement and left her there. Karis had food and water, some books and magazines, and a little bathroom for her needs. She was trapped for two days and two nights, and when Vernay returned, he had another book. That was why he had shut her up in the basement: so he could go buy a book, a collection of fairy tales.”

  “Fairy tales?” said Parker.

  “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, printed in London in 1908 by Constable, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. The original Rackham edition is very valuable. Some copies go for a thousand dollars or more on the Internet. There’s also a signed edition, and that goes for more than ten thousand.”

  “And was this one signed?”

  “No.”

  “Wait: he locked Karis Lamb in a basement for two days, just to possess a book of fairy tales worth a thousand dollars?”

  “A guy in England was killed for his first edition of The Wind in the Willows,” said Leila. “It was worth nearly seventy thousand dollars.”

  “There’s a big difference between a thousand and seventy thousand.”

  “Especially,” said Leila, “for a book that doesn’t exist.”

  Parker felt as though he’d fallen down a rabbit hole.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There is no 1908 Grimm’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The edition illustrated by Rackham wasn’t published until the following year.”

  “So the book was a forgery?”

  “No—or so Vernay told Karis. He wanted an audience, and she was the only one he had. He wanted someone to know what he’d found.”

  “So what exactly did Vernay buy?”

  Leila pushed the shoe box toward Parker.

  “Why don’t you take a look for yourself?”

  CHAPTER

  XCVII

  Holly Weaver received the call from her father as she was waiting at the drive-thru ATM. Her bank account was about to dip into three figures, but at least she was due to get paid on Friday, and with luck she’d score some decent tips over the weekend, especially if she could get a couple of tables to spring for wine.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “I’m thinking of taking Danny to a movie, see if it might buck his mood up.”

  “Sure. Did he nap?”

  “He dozed on the couch for a while, but he’s still not himself.”

  “It’s just tiredness.”

  “Yeah.”

  She heard the doubt.

  “Did something else happen?”

  Owen thought about telling her of the conversation he’d had with Daniel, the one about dead mothers, but decided to keep it to himself for now. It would only distress his daughter.

  “He’s just an odd one sometimes.”

  “I think he picked it up from his grandfather,” said Holly.

  “Yeah? Then his back talk is all you.”

  “Enjoy the movie, Dad. Easy on the popcorn, and keep the sodas small.”

  * * *

  DANIEL SAT AT HIS bedroom window. Daylight was fading into dusk, and a haze hung over the woods, but he thought he could still discern the figure of a woman amid the trees. If he opened the window, he might even have been able to hear her call his name.

  But he had no intention of opening the window.

  “Is she telling the truth?” said Daniel.

  He spoke to the girl in the corner, the one who kept her head low and seemed to bring shadows with her in order to conceal her face. Daniel should have been frightened of her, just as he was frightened of the woman: because the girl, too, was dead, except she didn’t make him feel scared, just drowsy and relaxed, like the cough medicine his mom sometimes gave him when his chest got tight. He could see the girl’s reflection in the glass, but when he looked over his shoulder, she wasn’t there.

  what did she tell you?

  “That I should do what Mommy said, that I should listen to her.”

  she’s not your mommy

  “She says she is.”

  sometimes when people die, they leave a piece of themselves behind

  “What kind of piece?”

  a sad piece, but it’s not really them, only their pain

  “She comes to my window.”

  she’s lonely

  “She wants me to go with her.”

  you mustn’t do that

  “She might make me.”

  she can’t make you

  you have to want it

  do you want it?

  “No. I just want her to go away.”

  she will

  “When?”

  soon

  “How do you know?”

  because she is about to be named, and she will rest after she is named

  “Who will name her?”

  The girl didn’t answer at first. Then:

  perhaps my father will name her

  Daniel looked from the girl’s reflection to the waiting woman.

  “Can you ask him to hurry?”

  CHAPTER

  XCVIII

  Parker picked up the shoe box. It had clearly remained untouched for a long time, because Leila Patton’s fingerprints had disturbed the dust on it. He lifted the lid. The book lay amid wads of newspaper, the boards worn at the corners, and slightly stained.

  “What did Vernay tell Karis?” Parker asked.

  “He said the book itself wasn’t important, just the pages in it. He said they had altered the volume, and changed the date, because that’s what they did. They were part of an atlas, he said, one that was old and enduring. He claimed the pages could rewrite.”

/>   “Rewrite books?”

  “Rewrite worlds. Be careful how you touch it.”

  “Is it delicate?”

  “No, but it can make you feel sick. Let me find some gloves for you.”

  She returned with a pair of leather gloves. They were too small for Parker’s hands, but he managed to get his fingers partway into them. He removed the book from the box, and examined the exterior before proceeding to the contents. A bookplate was fixed to the inside front cover, featuring the letter “D” repeated twice, and the word “London” beneath. The addition of the location was odd, and more indicative of a store or lending library than a private collection.

  Parker moved on to the first of the places where the pages were different. A larger single sheet, much older than the rest of the book, had at some point been folded twice and sewn into the binding between two other sections. The visible sides were blank, and made not from paper but what appeared to be some form of vellum, uncut at the top edges. He moved to the second insertion, and discovered the same.

  Very gently, Parker lifted one of the pages in an effort to see what was written on the interior of the folds. They were also unmarked. Why, Parker wondered, would someone go to the trouble of inserting blank pages into a volume? Unless, of course, they weren’t really blank at all. He tried to recall the ways in which invisible ink could be applied: lemon juice, wine, vinegar, sugar solution, bodily fluids, their message to be revealed later by the application of heat or chemicals.

  “Empty,” he said.

  “Not always.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes, if I leave the book open for long enough, I see patterns.”

  “What kind of patterns?”

  “It’ll sound crazy.”

  “Not to me.”

  Leila took a deep breath.

  “Okay, not patterns, but the ghosts of them. Sometimes they’re like maps, and other times they’re closer to architects’ drawings, but really detailed.”

  That fit with Parker’s thesis: an ink of some kind, activated by heat or light.