The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  “It’s her bedtime,” said Rebecca. “I never have to tell her when to go. She just heads up to bed all by herself. She likes her sleep. I’ll leave her to clean her teeth and read, then I’ll kiss her good night. I always try to kiss her good night, because then I know that she’s safe.”

  She leaned back against the brick wall of the basement and ran the fingers of her hand through her hair, pushing it back from her forehead and exposing her face.

  “He hadn’t touched her,” she said. “He’d done just what she said he’d done, but I understood what was happening. There was a moment, just before I brushed past him and took Jenna home, when I could see it in his eyes, and he knew that I saw it. He was tempted by her. It was starting again. It wasn’t his fault. It was an illness. He was sick. It was like a disease that had been in remission, and now it was returning.”

  “Why didn’t you tell someone?” I asked.

  “Because he was my father, and I loved him,” she replied. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. “I suppose that sounds ridiculous to you, after what he did to me.”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing sounds ridiculous to me anymore.”

  She worried at the floor with her foot. “Well, it’s the truth, for what it’s worth. I loved him. I loved him so much that I went back to the house that night. I left Jenna with April. I told her that I had some work to do at home, and asked if she’d mind letting Jenna sleep over with Carole. They often did that, so it was no big deal. Then I came here. My father answered the door, and I told him that we needed to talk about what had happened that day. He tried to laugh it off. He was doing some work in the basement and I followed him down here. He was going to lay a new floor, and he had already begun breaking up the old concrete. The rumors had started, by that point, and he’d virtually been forced to cancel all of his appointments. He was becoming a total pariah, and he knew it. He tried to hide his unhappiness about it. He said it would give him the time to do all kinds of jobs around the house that he’d been threatening to do for so long.

  “So he just kept breaking the floor while I screamed at him. He wouldn’t listen. It was as though I was making it all up, all the things that had happened to me, all the things that he’d done and that I believed he wanted to do again, but this time with Jenna. He would only say that whatever he had done, he’d done out of love. ‘You’re my daughter,’ he said. ‘I love you. I’ve always loved you. And I love Jenna too.’

  “And when he said that, something fell apart inside me. He had a pickax in his hands, and he was trying to lever up a slab of concrete. There was a hammer on the shelf beside me. He had his back to me and I hit him on the crown of the head. He didn’t fall down, not at first. He just bent over and put his hand to his scalp, like he’d smacked it against a beam. I hit him again, and he fell over. I think I hit him twice more. He started to bleed into the dirt and I left him there. I went upstairs to the kitchen. Blood had splashed on my face and hands, and I washed it off. I cleaned the hammer too. There was hair caught in it, I remember, and I had to pick at it with my fingers. I heard him moving down in the basement, and I thought he tried to say something. I couldn’t go back down, though. I just couldn’t. Instead, I locked the door and sat in the kitchen until it got dark and I couldn’t hear him moving around any longer. When I unlocked the door, he had crawled to the bottom of the stairs, but he hadn’t been able to climb up. I went down to him then, and he was dead.

  “I found some plastic sheeting in the garage and I wrapped him in it. There used to be a greenhouse in the back garden. It had a dirt floor. It was dark by then, and I dragged him out there. That was the hardest part: getting him up from the basement. He didn’t look like he weighed a lot, but it was all muscle and bone. I dug a hole and put him in, then covered him up again. I suppose I was already planning, already thinking ahead. It never crossed my mind to call the police or to confess to what I’d done. I just knew that I didn’t want to be separated from Jenna. She was everything to me.

  “When it was all done, I went home. The next night, I waited until dark then drove my father’s car up to Jackman and left it there. I reported him missing once the car was taken care of. The police came. Some detectives looked at the basement floor, like I knew they would, but my father had only just started tearing it up, and it was clear that there was nothing underneath it. They knew all about my father, and when they found the car up in Jackman they figured he’d fled.

  “After a couple of days, I came back and moved the body. I’d been lucky. It had been wicked cold that month. I guess it kept him, you know, from rotting too much, so there wasn’t a smell, not really. I started to dig in the basement. It took me most of the night, but he had taught me what to do. He always said that a girl should know how to take care of a house, how to fix things and keep them in order. I cleared a space of rubble and dug down until there was a hole big enough to take him. I covered him up, then I went upstairs and fell asleep in my old room. You wouldn’t think that someone could just fall asleep after doing something like that, but I slept straight through until midday. I slept so peacefully, better than I could ever remember doing before. Then I went back down and kept working. Everything that I needed to use was there, even a little mixer for the cement. Getting the rubble up took some time, and my back ached for weeks after, but once that was done it was all pretty easy. It took me a day or two over the weekend, all told. Jenna stayed with April. Everything just worked out.”

  “And then you moved into this house.”

  “I couldn’t sell it because it wasn’t mine to sell, and anyway I would have been afraid to do that even if it had been, just in case someone decided to renovate the basement and found what was there. It seemed better to move in. Then we just stayed here. You know what the strange thing is, though? You see those cracks in the floor? They’re new. They only started appearing in the last couple of weeks, ever since Frank Merrick came around causing trouble. It’s like he awakened something down there, as if my father heard him asking questions and tried to find a way back into the world. I’ve started to have nightmares. I dream that I hear noises from the basement, and when I open the door my father is climbing the steps, hauling himself up from the dirt to make me pay for what I’ve done, because he loved me and I’d hurt him. In my dream, he ignores me and starts crawling toward Jenna’s room, and I keep hitting him, over and over, but he won’t stop. He just keeps crawling, like a bug that won’t die.”

  Her toe had begun to explore one of the cracks in the floor. She withdrew it quickly when she became aware of what she was doing, the description of her nightmares reminding her of what lay below.

  “Who helped you with all of this?” I asked.

  “Nobody,” she said. “I did it alone.”

  “You drove your father’s car up to Jackman. How did you get back down after you’d abandoned it?”

  “I hitched a ride.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  But I knew that she was lying. After all that she had done, she wouldn’t have taken a chance like that. Someone followed her up to Jackman, then drove her back east again. I thought it might have been the woman April. I remembered the way they had looked at each other that night after Merrick had broken the window. Something had passed between them, a gesture of complicity, an acknowledgment of a shared understanding. It didn’t matter. None of it really mattered.

  “Who was the other man, Rebecca, the one who took the photograph?”

  “I don’t know. It was late. I heard someone drinking with my father, then they came to my room. They both smelled pretty bad. I can still recall it. It’s why I’ve never been able to drink whiskey. They turned on the bedside light. The man had a mask on, an old Halloween mask of a ghost that my father used to wear to frighten the trick-or-treaters. My father told me that the man was a friend of his, and that I should do the same things that I did for him. I didn’t want to, but . . .” She stopped for a moment. “I was seven years old,” she whispered. �
��That’s all. I was seven. They took pictures. It was like it was a game, a big joke. It was the only time it ever happened. The next day, my father cried and told me he was sorry. He told me again that he loved me, and that he never wanted to share me with anyone else. And he never did.”

  “And you’ve no idea who it might have been?”

  She shook her head, but she would not look at me.

  “There were more pictures of that night in Raymon Lang’s trailer. Your father’s drinking buddy was in them, but his head wasn’t visible. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his arm. Do you remember it?”

  “No. It was dark. If I did see it, I’ve forgotten it over the years.”

  “One of the other children who was abused mentioned the same mark. Someone suggested to me that it might be a military tattoo. Do you know if any of your father’s friends served in the army?”

  “Elwin Stark, he did,” she said. “I think Eddie Haver might have been in the army too. They’re the only ones, but I don’t think either of them had a tattoo like that on his arm. They came on vacation with us sometimes. I saw them on the beach. I would have noticed.”

  I let it go. I didn’t see what else I could do.

  “Your father betrayed those children, didn’t he?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I think so. They had those pictures of him with me. I guess that’s how they made him do what he did.”

  “How did they get them?”

  “I suppose the other man from that night passed them on to them. But you know, my father really did care about the kids he treated. He tried to look out for them. Those men made him choose the ones that he gave to them, made him pick children to be abused, but he seemed to work twice as hard for the rest because of it. I know it makes no sense at all, but it was almost like there were two Daniel Clays, the bad one and the good one. There was the one who abused his daughter and betrayed children to save his reputation, and the one who fought tooth and nail to save other kids from abuse. Maybe that was the only way he could survive without going insane: by separating the two parts, and by taking all of the bad stuff and calling it ‘love.’”

  “And Jerry Legere? You suspected him after you found him with Jenna, didn’t you?”

  “I saw something of what I had seen in my father in him,” she said, “but I didn’t know he was involved, not until the police came and told me how he had died. I think I hate him more than anyone. I mean, he must have known about me. He knew what my father had done, and somehow, it made me more attractive to him.” She shuddered. “It was like, when he was fucking me, he was fucking the child I was as well.”

  She sank down on the floor and laid her forehead on her arms. I could barely hear her when she spoke again.

  “What happens now?” she asked. “Will they take Jenna away from me? Will I go to jail?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing happens.”

  She lifted her head. “You’re not going to tell the police?”

  “No.”

  There was no more to say. I left her in the basement, sitting at the foot of the grave she had dug for her father. I got in my car and I drove away to the susurration of the sea, like an infinite number of voices offering quiet consolation. It was the last time I would ever hear the sea in that place, for I never returned to that place again.

  37

  There was one more link, one more connection that remained to be explored. After Gilead, I knew what connected Legere to Lang, and what in turn connected Lang to Gilead and to Daniel Clay. It wasn’t merely a personal link, but a professional one: the security firm, A-Secure.

  Joel Harmon was in his garden when I arrived, and it was Todd who answered the door and escorted me through the house to see him.

  “You look like you might have spent time in the army, Todd,” I said.

  “I ought to bust your ass for that,” he replied goodhumoredly. “Navy. Five years. I was a signalman, a damned good one too.”

  “You get all tattooed up in the navy?”

  “Damn straight,” he said. He rolled up the right sleeve of his jacket, revealing a twisted mass of anchors and mermaids. “I’m real traditional,” he said. He let the sleeve fall. “You got a reason for asking?”

  “Just curious. I saw how you handled your gun on the night of the party. It looked like you’d held one before.”

  “Yeah, well, Mr. Harmon’s a wealthy man. He wanted someone who could look out for him.”

  “You ever have to look out for him, Todd?” I asked.

  He stopped as we reached the garden, and stared at me. “Not yet,” he said. “Not like that.”

  Harmon’s son and daughter were both home that day, and halfway down the lawn Harmon was pointing out changes to them that he hoped to make to the flowers and shrubs come the spring.

  “He loves the garden,” said Todd, following the direction of my gaze and seemingly anxious to move the subject away from his gun and his obligations, real or potential, to Harmon. “Everything out there he planted himself, or helped to plant. The kids lent a hand too. It’s their garden as much as his.”

  But now I wasn’t looking at Harmon, or his children, or his garden. I was looking at the surveillance cameras that kept vigil on the lawn and the entrances to the house.

  “It looks like an expensive system,” I said to Todd.

  “It is. The cameras themselves switch from color output to black-and-white when the lighting conditions are poor. They’ve got focus and zoom capabilities, pan and tilt, and we have quad switchers that allow us to view all camera images simultaneously. There are monitors in the kitchen, Mr. Harmon’s office, the bedroom, and in my quarters. You can’t be too careful.”

  “No, I guess not. Who installed the system?”

  “A company called A-Secure, out of South Portland.”

  “Uh-huh. That was the company Raymon Lang worked for, wasn’t it?”

  Todd jerked like he’d just been hit with a mild electric shock.

  “I—I suppose it was.” Lang’s shooting, and the discovery of the child beneath his trailer, had been big news. It would have been hard for Todd to have missed it.

  “Was he ever out here, possibly to check the system? I’m sure it needs maintenance once or twice a year.”

  “I couldn’t say,” said Todd. He was already going on the defensive, wondering if he’d said too much. “A-Secure sends someone out regularly as part of the contract, but it’s not always the same guy.”

  “Sure. That figures. Maybe Jerry Legere came out here instead. I suppose the company will have to find someone else to take care of it, now that they’re both dead.”

  Todd didn’t reply. He seemed about to walk me down to Harmon, but I told him it wasn’t necessary. He opened his mouth to protest, but I raised a hand and he closed it again. He was smart enough to know that there was something going on that he didn’t fully understand, and the best thing to do might be to watch and listen, and intervene only if it became absolutely necessary. I left him on the porch and made my way across the grass. I passed Harmon’s kids on the way down as they headed back to the house. They looked at me curiously, and Harmon’s son seemed about to say something, but they both relaxed a little when I smiled at them in greeting. They were good-looking kids: tall, healthy, and neatly but casually dressed in various shades of Abercrombie & Fitch.

  Harmon didn’t hear me approach. He was kneeling by an Alpine garden flower bed dotted with weathered limestone, the rocks sunk firmly into the ground, the grain running inward and the soil around them scattered with stone chips. Low plants poked through the gaps between the rocks, their foliage purple and green, silver and bronze.

  My shadow fell across Harmon and he looked up.

  “Mr. Parker,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting company, and you sneaked up on my bad side. Nevertheless, now that you’re here it gives me the chance to apologize for what I said to you on the telephone when last we spoke.”

  He struggled a little to stand. I offered him my right hand and he took i
t. As I helped him up, I gripped his arm with my left hand, forcing the sleeve of his shirt and his sweater up on his forearm. The claws of a bird were briefly revealed upon his skin.

  “Thank you,” he said. He saw where my attention was directed, and moved to pull his sleeve back down.

  “I never asked you how you damaged your hearing,” I said.

  “It’s a little embarrassing,” he replied. “My left ear was always weaker than my right, the hearing just slightly worse. It wasn’t too serious, and it didn’t interfere any with my life. I wanted to serve in Vietnam. I didn’t want to wait for the draft. I was twenty, and full of fire. I was assigned to Fort Campbell for my basic training. I hoped to join the 173rd Airborne. You know, the 173rd was the only unit to make an airborne assault on an enemy position in Vietnam. Operation Junction City in sixty-seven. I might have made it over there too, except a shell exploded too close to my head during basic training. Shattered my eardrum. Left me near deaf in one ear and affected my balance. I was discharged, and that was as close as I ever got to combat. I was one week away from finishing basic.”

  “Is that where you got the tattoo?”

  Harmon rubbed his shirt against the place on his arm where the tattoo lay, but he did not expose the skin again.

  “Yeah, I was overoptimistic. I put the cart before the horse. Never got to add any years of service underneath. I’m just embarrassed by it now. I don’t show it much.” He peered carefully at me. “You seem to have come here armed with a lot of questions.”

  “I’ve got more. Did you know Raymon Lang, Mr. Harmon?”

  I watched him think for a moment.

  “Raymon Lang? Wasn’t he the guy who got shot up in Bath, the one who had the child stashed under his trailer? Why would I know him?”

  “He worked for A-Secure, the company that installed your surveillance system. He did maintenance for them on cameras and monitors. I wondered if you might have met him in the course of his work.”

  Harmon shrugged. “I might have. Why?”