The Glittering World (14 page)

On a bright Tuesday afternoon—the thirteenth day after the disappearance—their canvass brought them to the far side of the cove. They pulled past a mailbox plastered in bright stickers of plump cherubs and up a dirt drive to a prefab minihome, a beat-up yellow Volkswagen Beetle on the lawn with a faded 9/11 decal in the back window that depicted an exhausted firefighter slumped on a street curb and flanked by a pair of translucent, consoling angels.

Jason killed the ignition. “Who have we got?”

“Tanya Darrow,” Gabe said, reading from the clipboard in his lap. “Thirty-something single mother, according to Maureen, although she wasn’t completely sure about her age. Her husband died in a car crash and she mostly keeps to herself.”

Bare platform steps led up to the entrance. Twin wind chimes in the shape of seraphs swayed like hanged men on either side of the stairs, an Annunciation scene crocheted on the seat cushion of a wicker chair beside the door. Jason knocked and stepped back, while Gabe loitered a few feet away on the lawn. A harried-looking woman came to the door. She was lanky with
crimped red hair, dark bags under clearwater eyes that squinted fearfully into the midday light. A moment later three young children appeared, circling her as if she were a covered wagon under siege.

“Hello, Ms. Darrow? My name is—”

“Oh, I know who you are,” she said. “You’re the one whose wife . . .” She wasn’t going to finish.

“Yes. Jason Howard. And this is Gabriel Peck,” he added, poking a thumb in Gabe’s direction. “Do you have a minute?”

She shooed the kids inside and shut the door behind them. “Sorry to bother you,” Gabe said from the lawn. He held his scar-blemished hand behind his back, as he often did. “We’re going door to door, to see if anyone might have heard something about our friends.”

“I was wondering whether you were going to come this far around the bend.”

Jason smiled. “News travels fast.”

“Fast as an echo. But sorry, I really don’t think I know anything useful. It’s just the strangest thing that happened, isn’t it? How awful. It’s like the earth opened up and swallowed them.”

Swallowed them
, Jason thought.
That’s exactly what it feels like.

“Of course,” she went on, “I hope there’s been some kind of mistake. I wish you all the luck in the world.”

They’d had the same conversation with seventeen other Starling Cove residents that very afternoon, and Jason had long tired of the ongoing lack of substantive information. There had to be someone who knew something, anything. It was time for him to step up his game.

“It’s been so hard for us,” Jason said, affecting a more somber tone as he forced tears at the corners of his eyes. Was he really going to do this?
Forgive me
, he pleaded to the dead, if
not to God himself. “Not knowing where they are. We’ve already been through so much, coming from New York and all. So many lost. Almost five years past now, but for us it still seems like yesterday.”

“I’m so sorry.” She put a hand to her breast. “You weren’t there when it happened, were you? On 9/11?”

“I was. Right there. Under the towers.” He proceeded to tell her the entirety of his experience that day with every possible dramatic flourish, including his tearful reunion with Elisa back at his apartment, which had the woman welling up herself. By the end of his story, she had taken his hands and was lost in his eyes, her breath erratic as she choked back tears. He was disgusted with himself.

“Sometimes I think—” Jason stared up at the late-afternoon sky before he continued. “Sometimes I think they’ve become angels. All of them who died that day? Maybe they’re floating through the firmament right now! Tucked inside the Lord’s heavenly embrace, for all eternity. And they watch over us, even though we can no longer see them . . . I know that they’re here just the same. Our guardian angels.”

“They
are
angels now!” the woman said. “You poor thing. You poor thing . . .” She squeezed his hand. “You’ll be in my prayers. And so will your wife.”

Back in the car, he could barely make eye contact with Gabe. “Wow,” Gabe said from the passenger seat. “That was . . . something.” Jason couldn’t tell if the boy’s tone expressed revulsion or admiration, though most likely it was a combination of the two. “Did you make all that up on the spot?”

“Not as much as I would have liked. For what it’s worth.” He was surprised Blue never told Gabe, but in a way he was
touched; it was Jason’s story to tell, after all, and he respected Blue for recognizing that.

Jason started the engine and was already pulling out of the drive when the woman appeared beside the car and gestured for him to lower his window. “Just one thing,” she said, panting. “Did you speak to Fred Cronin yet?”

Jason looked to Gabe, who shook his head.

“Ask him.” She looked back at the house for a moment before lowering her voice. “Ask him about the Other Kind.”

“Darkening my door, I see.” Fred Cronin spoke with a weariness that suggested Jason and Gabe were not only expected but were in fact late. Were they supposed to know him? They had met so many locals lately. He did look somewhat familiar, what little Jason could see of him through the cracked door, a squat troll of a man with cavernous ruts in his face and an unkempt beard, a swollen nose, and bulging hazel eyes. Though Jason vaguely recognized him, he had the thought that it might be from a television show or movie, rather than from real life.

“How nice of Tanya to invite you over,” Cronin said. “That girl, that girl . . . Jesus holy hell. Well. What are you going to do. Anyhow.”

He disappeared from view, the door left an ambiguous foot ajar; it took Jason a few moments before he summoned the nerve to step inside. Gabe followed, daylight vanquished when he shut the door behind them. The outside of the single-story cottage may have been weather-beaten white, but aside from a stark bulb overhead the interior was dark as midnight, ancient roller shades drawn over the windows. Every surface was obscured, buried beneath books and documents and newspapers, stacked in some places to the rafters.
A hoarder?
Jason wondered, not sure where to rest his eyes. He tried to avoid Gabe’s nervous and sidelong glance.

“I run my own printing press out of the cellar,” Cronin said, and swept his arm in the direction of a perilous heap of papers on top of the woodstove. “Back issues of my journal. And I’m the only one who doesn’t charge storage.” He pulled two pamphlet-thin newspapers off the top of a nearby stack and handed one to each of them. “So, let’s get this over with, shall we?”

Below the ludicrously ornate nameplate of
The Starling Cove Believer
was the bold headline
SEARCH FOR WHITLEY AND FRIEND CONTINUES
, the subheading “Still Missing after a Week.” And there, reproduced in faulty black and white, was printed a recent photograph of Blue and Elisa. They were dancing, her arms around his neck with her back arched in a spasm of unmitigated bliss. It was like looking at Detective Jessed’s pictures all over again, the ones from Elisa’s camera. It was like seeing a pair of ghosts.

Now Jason remembered where he knew the man from: Fred Cronin was an artisan friend of Maureen and Donald’s he’d met at the ceilidh. An ironsmith, if memory served. He must have taken the photo that night.

“Beautiful girl,” Cronin said, and he cocked his head, his grizzled beard sweeping the front of his stained waffle shirt; Jason failed to detect any hint of lasciviousness in his voice. “That might be why they wanted her.”

“Why they . . . ?” Jason wasn’t sure he’d heard properly.

“You might as well stay awhile.” Their host moved a massive cairn of spiral-bound newspapers from a black velvet-upholstered couch so they could sit. For himself he produced a warped plastic chair from beneath a sagging card table covered in emptied beer bottles. “Tell me,” he said, pausing to light a cigarette. “How much do you two know about these parts?”

“You mean Cape Breton?” Jason said.

“I mean the cove.” The man couldn’t have been much past his midfifties, but he looked positively decrepit. “Have you noticed how different this place feels?” he said, hissing smoke through his teeth. “How the air smells, the unusual sound the wind makes as it whispers through the trees? The way the water tastes, even?”

“Yes,” Gabe said at once, much to Jason’s surprise. “It’s like everything is more . . . alive here. More energized.”

“So you do feel it,” Cronin said. “Not everybody does. Only the sensitive,” and he cast a baleful look at Jason. “When I first moved up here I figured the cove was hyperoxygenated. The way places like Big Sur are, with all the runoff into the lakes and waterways, you know? Locations like that, they tend to attract specific kinds of people, since back in the day. Seekers and such, the occasional religious freak. And Starling Cove is no different. Take the water, for example. That’s why we’ve always had the best screech.”

“Screech?” Gabe said.

“Shine. Moonshine. You could make a decent living bootlegging in these parts, right through the eighties. Lots of the houses around here, they still have the old gin stills in the basement, or rum-running tunnels that lead down to the water. And believe you me, the Colony made the best screech of all.”

“The commune,” Jason said. “Were you a part of that place?”

“Not as such.”

“But they made moonshine there? At the Colony?”

“Most everyone did around here. None better than those folks. Donald’s secret recipe.”

“Donald was part of the Colony? Maureen’s husband?”

“Part of it? Hell, he founded the damned place.”

“He did?” Gabe said. “But he seems so . . . professorial.”

“That was the type back then. Like Leary and Ginsburg and Castaneda, middle-aged guys with that father figure thing working for them. And Donald with his pipe and elbow patches . . . Worked like catnip, especially when it came to the ladies. Take a look at Maureen! She was a local girl, native Mi’kmaq even, only stopped in to the Colony for a visit one day and never left. Not until the fire, that is.” He watched the smoke from his cigarette curl around the plastic light fixture and its single dim bulb. “What did your missing friend tell you about life in the cove? About growing up here?”

“Not much,” Jason said. “He hardly remembered a thing about it.”

“And you believed him.”

“Why wouldn’t we? He was only a boy.”

“That’s what his mama kept saying.” He chuckled. “Should’ve known who he was when I laid eyes on him. Sensed he was one of them. But I was thrown by the name. Not to mention the fact that our workaday world seems to have rubbed off on him. Poor little Hansel . . .”

“Hansel?”

“Sorry. Michael. Or
Blue
,” Cronin said, in a theatrical tenor redolent with sarcasm. “I mean, what was he going to tell you about his people, if he even could? The real question is why he came back after all this time. Why now?”

“He came back to sell his grandmother’s house.” Jason tried to settle on the couch.

“Yeah, well, how’d that work out for him?” He lit another cigarette off the first and stubbed the spent butt into the side of an overflowing crenellated ashtray, browned filters bent into the shapes of scoliotic spines. “He’s probably still alive, if it’s any comfort. Flora was a crafty one, but the Other Kind are craftier.”

“The Other Kind.” Jason looked to Gabe. “Tanya Darrow said something about that.”

“They’re the ones that live here. Under the ground.”

“Under the ground?” Gabe sat up in his seat.

“Underground, under the bay, wherever they are. It’s hard to say exactly. They’re tough to put a finger on, since the land around these parts has a funny way of adapting whenever it suits the Kind. They live somewhere in the earth, but you’ll never find them down there unless you raze the mountain. Not without one of them to take you. And not a one ever will. Anyway, most everyone knows they’re here. Either of you gents want a beer? No?”

As if he’d said nothing unusual whatsoever, the odd little man got up and wandered off to his kitchen. He spent such an interminably long while retrieving a cold one from the fridge that it was hard not to feel he was toying with them.

“So you were telling us about the Other Kind,” Jason said once Cronin finally returned to his chair, beer and bottle opener in hand. “About the . . . I’m sorry, the ones underground?”

“Right.”

“Right what?”

“Are you messing with me, son?”

“Not at all.”
What is up with this guy?
“Please, go on.”

“As I was saying, nearly everyone around these parts has heard of them. Old country folks call them the Fae, but really they’re talking about the Other Kind.”

Fae.
Jason recalled Donald using that word, at the ceilidh. “So, they’re out there somewhere,” he said. “Under the bay, maybe. But what are they?”

“Do you mean they’re like nature spirits?” Gabe asked.

“Hard to say for certain, since they’re not meant to be
known. But they’re here all right, as sure as the seasons change. They just don’t like to be seen. That’s why if they come, they come at night. They like to take things. Laundry off the line, bottles from the recycling, a hood ornament now and again . . .” He leaned back in his chair. “No one knows what they are exactly, but everyone’s got a theory. At least I do.”

“Tell us. Please.” Gabe was breathless, and Jason recalled the
Weird Creatures of Atlantic Canada
paperback the boy had picked up at the airport newsstand in Halifax. “What do you think they are?”

“See, that’s the funny thing.” Cronin ran a fingertip along his chair arm, a landing strip cleared across a thick pad of dust. “Because what I think they are is the same thing everyone else does. But most people don’t know that. They haven’t thought it through. Take the old-timers, like Donald. They tend to be the more open-minded types, the ones willing to admit that there’s a presence here. They mostly think the woods are harboring fairies.”

“Fairies.” Jason said it with a straight face, but his inner clinician triggered the diagnostic process. Delusional disorder, for starters; possibly a more severe paranoiac element to boot, with a potential for schizophrenic tendencies. And a chronic alcohol abuser to be sure, a constellation of red capillaries broken across the man’s bulbous nose. “You think fairies took my wife.”