The White Road-CP-4 (8 page)

“So far, we’ve identified about two hundred different species of spider, as well as about fifty other species of insect,” Dr. Martin Lee Howard said. He said the collection contained some very rare species, including a number that his team had so far failed to identify.

“One of them seems to be some form of extremely nasty cave spider,” said Dr. Howard. “It’s certainly not a native of the United States.” Asked if there were any patterns emerging from his research, Dr. Howard said that the only common factor uniting the various species at this point was their “general unpleasantness. I mean, insects and spiders are my life’s work and even I have to admit that there are a lot of these guys and gals I wouldn’t like to find in my bed at night.”

Dr. Howard added: “But we did discover a lot of recluse spiders, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Whoever assembled this collection had a real affection for recluses, and that’s not something you’re going to find too often. Affection is pretty much the last thing the average person is going to feel for a recluse.”

I refolded the paper, then threw it in the trash can. The possibility of a bail appeal was troubling. The attorney general’s office had gone straight to a grand jury after Faulkner’s apprehension, common practice in a case which looked set to deal with matters that had gone unsolved for a long time. A twenty-three-member grand jury had been specially convened at Calais, in Washington County, twenty-four hours after Faulkner was found, and an arrest warrant had been issued upon his indictment on charges of murder, conspiracy to murder, and accomplice liability in the murder of others. The state had then asked for a “Harnish hearing” to decide upon the issue of bail. In the past, when the death penalty had still existed in the state of Maine, those accused of capital offenses were not entitled to bail. After the abolition of the death penalty, the constitution was amended to deny bail for formerly capital offenses as long as there was “proof evident and presumption great” in the alleged guilt of the accused. In order for that proof and presumption to be established, the state could request a Harnish hearing, conducted before a judge with both sides entitled to present arguments.

Both Rachel and I had given evidence before the hearing, as had the primary detective from the state police responsible for the investigation into the deaths of Faulkner’s flock and the murder of four people in Scarborough, allegedly on Faulkner’s orders. The deputy AG, Bobby Andrus, had argued that Faulkner was both a flight risk and a potential threat to the state’s witnesses. Jim Grimes did his best to pick holes in the prosecutor’s arguments but barely six days had elapsed since Faulkner’s apprehension and Grimes was still playing catch-up. Altogether it was enough for the judge to deny bail, but only just. There was, as yet, little hard evidence to link Faulkner to the crimes of which he was accused, and the Harnish hearing had forced the state to demonstrate the comparative paucity of its case. That Jim Grimes was now talking publicly about an appeal indicated that he believed a judge in the state’s highest court might reach a different conclusion on the bail issue. I didn’t want to think about what might happen if Faulkner was released.

“We could take the long view and look at it as free publicity,” I said, but the joke sounded hollow. “There’s no getting away from it, not until they put him away permanently, and maybe not even then.”

“I guess it’s your defining moment.” She sighed.

I put on my best earnest romantic look and clasped her hand. “No,” I told her, as dramatically as I could. “You define me.”

She mimed sticking her finger down her throat, but she smiled and the shadow of Faulkner passed from us for a time. I reached out and held her hand, and she raised my fingers to her mouth and licked the last of the ice cream from the tips.

“Come on,” she said, and her eyes shone with a new hunger. “Let’s go home.”

But there was a car standing in the driveway of the house when we arrived. I recognized it as soon as I glimpsed it through the trees: Irving Blythe’s Lincoln. When we pulled up he opened his door and stepped out, the sound of classical music from NPR flowing like honey into the still evening air. Rachel said hi and headed into the house. I watched as the lights went on in our bedroom and the shades came down. Irv Blythe had picked his moment perfectly if he was trying to come between me and an active love life.

“How can I help you, Mr. Blythe?” I asked, my tone betraying the fact that right now helping him was pretty low down on my list of priorities.

His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his short-sleeved shirt tucked tightly into the elastic waistband. His pants were shucked up high over what remained of his paunch, making his legs look too long for his body. We had spoken little since I had agreed to look into the circumstances of his daughter’s disappearance. Instead, I dealt mostly with his wife. I had gone back over the police reports, begun to speak again to those who had seen Cassie in the days before she disappeared, and retraced her movements in those final days; but too much time had elapsed for those who recalled her to remember anything new. In some cases, they had trouble remembering anything at all. I had come up with nothing remarkable so far, but I had declined the offer of a retainer similar to that enjoyed for so long by Sundquist. I told the Blythes that I would bill them for my time, nothing more. Yet if Irv Blythe wasn’t openly hostile toward me, he still left me with the sense that he would have preferred it if I had not become involved in the investigation. I was not sure how the events of the previous day would affect our relationship. As it turned out, it was Blythe who brought them up.

“Yesterday, at the house…” he began, then stopped.

I waited.

“My wife thinks I owe you an apology.” His face was very red.

“What do you think?”

He was nothing if not blunt.

“I think I wanted to believe Sundquist and that man he brought with him. I resented you for taking away the hope they brought with them.”

“It was false hope, Mr. Blythe.”

“Mr. Parker, until now we’ve had no hope at all.”

He removed his hands from his pockets and started to dig at the skin in the center of his palms, hoping to locate the source of his pain there and remove it like a splinter. I noticed half-healed sores on the back of his hands and the exposed patches of his scalp, where he had torn at himself in his hurt and frustration.

It was time to clear the air between us.

“I get the sense that you don’t like me very much,” I said.

His right hand stopped digging and flailed loosely at the air, as if he were trying to grasp his feelings toward me, to snatch them from the air so he could display them on his wrinkled, gouged palm instead of being forced to put them into words.

“It’s not that,” he began. “I’m sure that you’re very good at what you do. It’s just that I know about you. I’ve read the newspaper reports. I know that you solve difficult cases, that you’ve found out the truth about people who’ve been missing for years, longer even than Cassie. The trouble is, Mr. Parker, that those people are usually dead when you find them.” The final words came out in a rush, and left him with a tremble in his voice. “I want my daughter back alive.”

“And you think that hiring me is like an admission that she’s gone forever?”

“Something like that.”

Irv Blythe’s words seemed to open wounds inside me that, like his own exposed sores, were only half healed. There were those whom I had failed to save, that was true, and there were others who were long gone before I had even begun to understand the nature of what had been visited upon them. But I had made an accommodation with my past, a recognition that although I had failed to protect individuals, had even failed to protect my own wife and child, I was not entirely responsible for what had happened to them. Susan and Jennifer had been taken by another, and even had I sat with them twenty-four hours a day for ninety-nine days, he would have waited until the hundredth day for me to turn my back briefly before he came for them at last. Now I spanned two worlds, the worlds of the living and the dead, and to both I tried to bring some measure of peace. It was all that I could do in reparation. But I would not have my failings judged by Irving Blythe, not now.

I opened his car door for him. “It’s getting late, Mr. Blythe. I’m sorry that I can’t offer you the reassurance that you want. All I can say is that I’ll keep asking questions. I’ll keep trying.”

He nodded and looked out over the marsh, but made no move to get into his car. The moonlight shone on the waters, and the sight of the gleaming channels seemed to jolt him into some final form of self-examination.

“I know she’s dead, Mr. Parker,” he said softly. “I know that she’s not coming home to us alive. All I want is to put her to rest somewhere pretty and quiet where she can be at peace. I don’t believe in closure. I don’t believe that this thing will ever be closed to us. I just want to lay her down, and to be able to go to her with my wife and place flowers at her feet. You understand?”

I almost reached out and touched him, but Irving Blythe was not a man for such gestures between men. Instead, I spoke to him as gently as I could.

“I understand, Mr. Blythe. Drive carefully. I’ll be in touch.”

He climbed into his car and didn’t look at me until he had turned toward the road. Then I saw his eyes in the rearview, and caught the hatred in them for the words that I had somehow forced him to speak, the admission that I had drawn from deep inside him.

I didn’t join Rachel, not for some time. I sat on my porch and watched the passing lights of solitary cars until the biting of the insects forced me inside. By then, Rachel was asleep, and yet she smiled as she felt me close beside her.

Beside both of them.

That night a car drew up outside Elliot Norton’s house on the outskirts of Grace Falls. Elliot heard the car door opening, then footsteps running across the grass of his yard. He was already reaching for the gun on his nightstand when the window of his bedroom exploded inward and the room erupted into flame. The burning gasoline splashed his arms and chest and set fire to his hair. He was still burning when he staggered down the stairs, through his front door, and onto his lawn, where he rolled in the damp grass to quench the fire.

He lay on his back in the moonlight and watched his house burn.

And as Elliot Norton’s house flamed far to the south, I awoke to the sound of a car idling on Old County Road. Rachel was asleep beside me, something clicking inside her air passages as she breathed, a soft noise as regular as the ticking of a metronome. Gently, I slipped from beneath the covers and walked to the window.

In the moonlight, an old black Cadillac Coupe de Ville stood on the bridge that crossed the marshes. Even from a distance, I could see the dents and scratches on the paintwork, the brokenlimb curve of the damaged front bumper, and the spiderweb tracery of cracked glass in the corner of the windshield. I could hear its engine rumbling but no smoke came from the exhaust; and though the moon was bright that night I could not glimpse the interior of the car through the dark glass of the windows.

I had seen such a car before. It had been driven by a being named Stritch, a foul creature, pale and deformed. But Stritch was dead, a hole torn in his chest, and the car had been destroyed. Then the rear door of the Cadillac opened. I waited for someone to emerge, but no one did. Instead the car just stood, its door wide open, for a minute or two until an unseen hand pulled the door closed, the coffin-lid thud coming to me across water and grass, and the car moved away, executing a U-turn to head northwest toward Oak Hill and Route 1. I heard movement from the bed.

“What is it?” asked Rachel.

I turned to her and saw the shadows drifting across the room, clouds chased by moonlight, until they reached her and, slowly, began to devour her paleness.

“What is it?” asked Rachel.

I was back in bed, except now I was sitting bolt upright and I had pushed the sheets away from me with my feet. Her hand was warm upon me, flat against my chest.

“There was a car,” I said.

“Where?”

“Outside. There was a car.”

I stepped naked from the bed and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtain, but there was nothing there, only the road, quiet, and the silver threads of the water on the marsh.

“There was a car,” I said, for the last time.

And I saw the marks of my fingertips against the window, left there as I reached out the car, just as they, reflected in the glass, now reached out for me.

“Come back to bed,” she said.

I went to her and I held her, spoonlike, as she slipped softly into sleep. And I watched over her until morning came.

3

E LLIOT NORTON CALLED me again the morning after the arson attack. He had first-degree burns to his face and arms. He considered himself pretty lucky, all told. The fire had destroyed three rooms on the second floor of his house and left a big hole in his roof. No local contractor would touch the work and he’d engaged some guys from Martinez, just across the Georgia state line, to fix up the damage.

“You talk to the cops?” I asked him.

“Yeah, they were out here first thing. They got no shortage of suspects, but if they can make a case I’ll retire from law and become a monk. They know it’s linked to the Larousse case and I know it’s linked to the Larousse case, so we’re all in agreement. Just lucky I’m not paying them for their opinion.”

“Any suspects?”

“They’ll round up some of the local assholes, but it won’t do much good, not unless someone saw or heard something and is willing to stand up and say it. A lot of folks will take the view that I shouldn’t have expected anything less for taking this on.”

There was a pause. I could feel him waiting for me to fill the silence. In the end I did, and felt my feet start to slide as the inevitability of my involvement became clear.

“What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? Cut the kid loose? He’s my client, Charlie. I can’t do that. I can’t let them intimidate me out of this case.”