That was where Alex saw the man, or what might once have been a man. He was dressed in black, but his head was bare despite the cold, revealing a bald pate fringed in red, the color of his hair matching that of his beard, which ran like the strap of a helmet from ear to ear.
He was walking parallel to the road on a bank of thick snow. The sight of someone marching bareheaded through the trees would have been unusual enough at this time of year, because a cold wind was blowing, and the drifts hid hollows and tree roots, so it was easy to misstep and take a fall. But what made this particular individual even more distinctive, and caused Alex to veer into a ditch, spilling him from his saddle, was that he was not walking through the snow but over it: his shoes were clearly visible when he should have been buried in white almost to his knees. It was also clear to Alex, even in this poor light, that the man was leaving no footprints, not a one.
Alex lay on his back, the front wheel of his bicycle still spinning beside him. He hadn’t hurt himself in the fall, but the air had been knocked out of him. More to the point, he was scared shitless.
The man stopped walking, frozen in midstep, like a hunter alerted to the presence of a deer. For a moment he remained entirely still, until his attention slowly began to shift in Alex’s direction. His features were smudged and indistinct, as though a thumb had smeared itself across an ink drawing of a face. His head tilted slightly to one side, taking in the boy and his bicycle, then—
Well, Alex could only describe him as turning in upon himself. The man pivoted on his right foot so that his right side was now toward Alex, then took a step forward and was gone, leaving no sign that he had ever been there to begin with.
Alex scrambled to his feet, grabbed his bicycle, and made a running start along the road. He didn’t look back. He didn’t dare. And although he had never seen this apparition before, still he knew it for what it was, because he’d heard his father whisper to his mother of just such a figure, when his father thought he was going mad.
The Brethren shadowed Alex through the forest, watching him from the trees. Another haunting had begun.
7
The meal at Al’s wasn’t the most convivial that Parker could recall, although Sam didn’t let the chill between her parents prevent her from enjoying her cheeseburger and cup of fries, as well as a strawberry milk shake. She declined to accompany Rachel when she went to the bathroom, and stayed with her father at the table, sipping the last of her shake and watching a small snowplow at work in the parking lot.
‘Do I have to go visit with Emily again?’ she asked.
‘I think it might help,’ Parker replied.
‘I don’t need help.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
She spoke in a tone that brooked no argument. It was a simple statement of fact.
‘It might make your mom feel better about things.’
Sam considered this.
‘Okay.’ She sucked noisily through the straw. ‘Did Mom tell you about the picture?’
‘What picture?’
‘Emily asked me to draw a picture of my house and my family. I did like she asked, and she just looked at me funny.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, I drew Grandpa and Grandma, and Mom, and you – and Walter, although dogs are hard. And I drew the house. I thought it was pretty good.’
‘And Emily didn’t?’
‘She showed it to Mom after, when I was waiting outside. She told Mom that she thought I felt like I wasn’t part of my own family because I didn’t put myself in the picture.’
‘Why didn’t you draw yourself?’
‘I was the artist. How could I draw myself if I was the one drawing everyone else?’
Parker sipped his coffee. It made sense to him, but then he never claimed to be a psychologist.
‘So,’ Sam continued, ‘I drew another picture and brought it to Emily today, and I put a girl in it. She asked if it was me.’
‘And what did you tell her?’
‘I just smiled. She figured it for a yes.’
Parker found that he was holding on too hard to his coffee cup. The sounds of the other people in the restaurant faded away, and there was only Sam, him, and the whiteness beyond.
‘But it wasn’t you, was it?’ he said.
‘No.’
Jennifer, he thought: she put her dead half sister into her drawing.
‘Do you still see Jennifer?’
‘You know I do.’
His throat hurt, and his eyes were warm. He blinked to try to keep the tears away. He couldn’t help it. This was wrong. And yet:
‘How often does she come to you?’
‘A lot.’
‘Is she …?’
His voice trailed off. He didn’t know what he wanted to ask, or nothing that could be captured in a single word. Happy, sad, angry, frightened – did these concepts even have any meaning for what Jennifer now was?
And Sam replied, ‘She is.’
Yes, he thought: if there was only one truth, then that was it. She is. She exists. Anything else was purely incidental.
Sam was draining the last of her milk shake, assessing him over the glass. He stepped carefully. He found that he did so more and more often around her. He looked to his left. Rachel had stopped to speak with someone over by the restroom. He couldn’t see who it was from where he sat. Her body was turned slightly away from the other speaker, as though she was not inclined to linger. Whatever the nature of the conversation, she would be back at the table very soon.
‘Sometime you’re going to have to talk to me about what really happened at the motel,’ he said.
Sam detached herself from the straw and opened her mouth to object, but he held up his hand to stop her.
‘I know what you’re going to say. You’ll tell me about being careful, and people listening, and I understand all that. But I’m still your father, and I can’t protect you if I can’t talk with you about stuff.’
Rachel extricated herself, and began moving toward them. Only when she was almost – but not quite – within earshot did Sam speak again.
‘But you’re not protecting me, Daddy. I’m protecting you.
‘And,’ she added softly, ‘the ones who are listening aren’t people …’
8
The sky was gray as they emerged from Al’s. Parker checked the forecast on his phone. More snow was due, and the meteorologists were advising people against unnecessary travel. He could leave Burlington and start driving, but the likelihood was that he’d be caught in the worst of the storm before he even got halfway back to the coast. It would be a slow, tedious, stressful trip. He was better off staying where he was for the night, and starting out early in the morning when the roads were clear.
He looked at Rachel. They’d made love when last he stayed in Vermont. He was injured at the time, and she was hurting from a breakup, and they cared about each other and loved each other enough to be able to draw comfort from a night together. That wouldn’t be happening tonight, or perhaps ever again. Sam’s abduction had altered the delicate balance between them, possibly irrevocably.
‘I’m going to find somewhere in town for the night,’ he told her.
Rachel didn’t bother asking him where he was going to stay. She probably guessed: there was a little inn near the university that he had grown to like. He’d slept in enough motel beds to want to avoid them whenever possible.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said.
‘Sure.’
He hugged Sam. A little fragment of his heart came loose and was lost to him each time he had to say goodbye to her. He’d never believed it would come to this. He’d never wanted to be one of those fathers.
‘Take care of your mom,’ he told her.
‘I will. Love you, Bear.’
‘Love you too, Bear.’
He watched them drive away. He felt trapped in a strange dream from which he could not awaken; each time he opened his eyes, he found himself mire
d deeper in unreality.
And he was frightened of his daughter.
He got in his car and started the engine, then sat for a time to let the windows clear. The door to Al’s opened, and a man emerged. He had neatly coiffed white hair, and the tanned skin of someone who could afford to escape much of the winter for sunnier climes. It was Jeff, Rachel’s former boyfriend – asshole boyfriend, Parker corrected himself, although the asshole part was a given. Burlington was a small city; too small, sometimes. If it was with Jeff that Rachel had been talking in the restaurant, then why hadn’t she mentioned it to him when she returned to the table? Actually, he knew the answer: any discussion of Jeff would only have darkened an already somber mood.
Parker’s Mustang was distinctive enough to draw a second glance even in passing, but Jeff must have been looking for it. Parker saw him pause at the door and scan the lot before locking onto the car. His expression was one of restrained distaste, but he gave no other acknowledgment of Parker’s presence. There was just the pause, and the look, before he walked off to the left and disappeared around the corner.
Al’s wasn’t Jeff’s kind of place. He didn’t much care for eating with his fingers, or being surrounded by folks who did. So what, Parker wondered, was he doing there? It didn’t take a PI’s license to figure out the answer to that one.
If Jeff starts dating Rachel again, Parker thought, I’ll have him killed.
Slowly.
The inn was otherwise unoccupied by guests that evening. He was given a large room with a bay window overlooking the garden, and beyond it a view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. He put his overnight bag in a corner. He always kept a canvas carrier in the trunk of his car, filled with a couple of changes of clothing, some toiletries, and a little medical kit. He took the room’s wingback chair and checked his phone. He saw that he’d missed a call from Art Currier, which he now returned.
‘Art?’
‘That camp is way out in the willy-wags. Even in summer it’d be hard to get to.’
‘Meaning?’
‘It’s empty, and I don’t think anyone’s been down that trail since before the first snowfall.’
‘Did you ask around?’
‘Didn’t need to, but figured you might want confirmation. This Eklund doesn’t have many neighbors, and up there most people incline toward minding their own business, but I rousted an old coot who thought the owner might have cleared out some stuff last year: furniture, bedding, and the like. He hasn’t seen him since.’
Parker thanked Currier, and told him he’d send a check.
‘Send cash. It was me who hauled his ass out there, not the IRS.’
Currier hung up, and Parker opened his laptop to go through e-mail. There was nothing from Ross to indicate that the missing Eklund had reappeared, so he pulled up a map of Providence, Rhode Island, saved a couple of screenshots, and booked a hotel room equidistant between the home and office addresses of the missing PI. Then, because it was on Ross’s dime, he booked a second room. One night alone was enough, and he decided he might want some company in Providence.
9
Alex MacKinnon didn’t eat all of his supper that night. He told his mom he wasn’t feeling so good. May MacKinnon put her hand to her son’s forehead and found it cool to the touch, but he was definitely shivering, and she was worried that he might have caught a chill. That bicycle: while part of her was pleased to see her son growing more independent, she hated the thought of him cycling to and from school. Some people just drove like jerks, and cell phones had made their kind into jerks squared. Every time she saw a dumb bitch or bastard texting or talking while trying to drive with one hand, she wanted to put a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger. She didn’t want her son to end up dead in the gutter just because a seventeen-year-old was too busy with a phone to keep her eyes on the road.
She checked on Alex shortly after eight. He was lying under the covers of his bed, watching YouTube videos on his iPad. He was wearing earphones, so he didn’t notice her at the door, and she decided not to disturb him. She considered keeping him home from school the next day. Alex wasn’t one of those kids who complained of being ill when they weren’t. She’d see how he was feeling in the morning and make a final decision then.
She went to the storage closet beside the first-floor bathroom, which was where they kept the laundry hamper. She’d noticed earlier that it was pretty full, and it wouldn’t hurt to put up a load while she had time. It would mean she could transfer it to the dryer before she went to bed, and it would be ready to go in the morning.
Of course, there was less washing now than there used to be.
Mike, Alex’s father, would be missing for a year come April. He’d been suffering from depression, and privately most people believed that he’d taken his own life. May didn’t hold with that, though, not one little bit. Her husband might sometimes have been sad, but not only wasn’t Mike the kind to do away with himself (although was there really such a thing as ‘the kind’, May often wondered, when she lay alone in their bed and wept for the absence at her left side), but he wasn’t a man who would abandon his wife and son to pain and uncertainty in the aftermath. He had always been a gentle, courteous individual. He couldn’t even accept a complimentary dessert at the Sovereign Grille without sending a thank-you card a day or two later. He wouldn’t have killed himself without leaving a note for his wife and child, but she struggled even to envisage him writing such a missive. Mike was a quiet man, but he never kept his pain bottled up. They’d always been able to talk to each other, right from the start. He’d been open with her about every aspect of his life.
Even his family.
God, getting in touch with Mike’s brother after Mike went missing was just about the hardest thing she’d ever done. Mike would have hit the ceiling, but then Mike wasn’t around, which was the whole point, and May’s fear was that his disappearance might be linked to his brother’s activities. If that were the case, then his brother would know whom to approach, and where to look. But this, too, was a dead end. Mike’s brother helped, or appeared to, but she couldn’t really know for sure.
And as for that woman with him – Jesus, she gave May the creeps.
She’d held on to hope. Mike could have been involved in an accident, or suffered some type of stroke. For all anyone knew, he might have been stuck in Boise, Idaho, with no recollection of his previous life, living with the homeless, just another man who’d fallen through the cracks. Lately, though, she’d come to feel that he was dead. She sensed it as a severing of the bond between them, perhaps because they’d always been so close. Maybe her desire to have him returned to her alive had caused her to remain willfully blind to reality. It was as though she had been shot, or stabbed, during some incident of panic and flight, and the recognition of her injury was only emerging as the adrenaline subsided.
But Mike had been unhappy, even troubled, in those last weeks before he disappeared. He’d been scared, too. He thought he might have a tumor, or bleeding on the brain. He started getting bad headaches. He admitted to experiencing what he thought were hallucinations, both visual and auditory. He was seeing people who weren’t there, hearing voices in empty rooms. His physician referred him for tests, but before he could be checked out, Mike was gone.
May opened the laundry hamper. Alex’s clothes were in a wet ball on top, discarded from earlier in the day. Funny, she thought, it hadn’t started snowing again until he got home. She picked up his trousers and saw that they were still damp, and marked with dirt along the left leg. There was also a hole in one knee. She knew then that he had fallen off his bike and hadn’t told her. That child: it wasn’t a chill he was fighting off – well, it might be a little, given how wet his clothes were – but shock. Good grief, he might even have hurt himself and been afraid to tell her. It would be just like him to keep it secret in case she forbade him to ride a bike ever again, not even when he left home and got married, because she’d say something about it at the wedd
ing reception just to be sure that his new wife knew what a doofus he was when it came to two wheels and a chain.
She tossed the clothes on the floor and stomped back upstairs. She wasn’t angry with him, or not very, but she was concerned. She’d have to insist on his letting her see that left leg. She had visions of it swollen and bruised under the comforter, maybe with a bend in it where no bend should be …
She opened the door to Alex’s room, but he was no longer in bed. She could see that both of his legs were fine, too, because he was standing in his boxers and T-shirt with his back to her, facing the window. The drapes were open, and a pale version of her son hung in the darkness while snow fell around him. She felt a terrible sense of foreboding, as though she were experiencing a visitation by the ghost he must someday become.
‘Honey,’ she said, ‘did you have an accident on your bike today?’
He didn’t turn around, didn’t even acknowledge her presence. That was his father in him. For all his openness, Mike would very occasionally pretend that he couldn’t hear her when she got into one of her rages, especially if it was over something he had done, hoping it would all just blow over and obviate the need to deal with it. Actually, she believed that it might be hardwired into the whole male gender, because her own father had been like that as well. He’d even been known to sneak out the back door and head for the safety of town when his wife armed herself and went on the warpath.
‘Alex,’ she said, ‘I’m talking to you.’
Only then did he turn. His face was milky white, his mouth like a red wound in his flesh.
‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Mom.’
She went to him, her arms open to enfold him.
‘What is it, Alex? What is it, baby?’
And she saw them even as he spoke.
‘Mom, there are people in the woods.’
A Game of Ghosts Page 4
