The White Road

by John Connolly

  But, someday, you might go back to that cabin and lift up those same floorboards, and where once there were a dozen snakes there would now be hundreds and no collection of old boards and decaying timbers would be enough to contain them. Because ignoring them or forgetting them doesn’t make them go away.

  It just makes it easier for them to breed.

  That afternoon, I left Rachel working in her office and headed into Portland. My trainers and sweats were in the trunk of the car, and I had intended to go into One City Center and do a couple of circuits, but instead I ended up walking the streets, browsing in Carlson amp; Turner’s antiquarian bookstore up on Congress Street and Bullmoose Music down in the Old Port. I picked up the new Pinetop Seven album, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, a copy of Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker, and Leisure and Other Songs by a group called Spokane, because they were led by Rick Alverson, who used to head up Drunk and who made the kind of music you wanted to listen to when old friends let you down or you caught a glimpse of a former lover on a city street, her fingers entwined with those of another, looking at him in a way that reminded you of how she had once looked at you. There were still crowds of tourists around, the last of the summer wave. Soon the leaves would start to turn in earnest and then the next wave would arrive to watch the trees burn like fire as far north as the Canadian border.

  I was angry with Elliot and more angry with myself. It sounded like a difficult case but difficult cases were part of the job. If I sat around waiting for easy ones, then I’d starve or go crazy. Two years ago, I’d have headed down to South Carolina to help him out without a second thought, but now I had Rachel and I was about to become a father again. I had been given a second chance, and I didn’t want to endanger it in any way.

  I found myself back at my car. This time, I took my kit from the trunk and spent an hour pushing myself as hard as I had ever pushed myself in the gym, working until my muscles burned and I had to sit on a bench with my head down before the worst of the nausea had passed. But I still felt ill as I drove back to Scarborough, and the sweat that dripped from my face was the sweat of the sickbed.

  Rachel and I didn’t talk properly about the call until dinner that evening. We had been together as a couple for about nineteen months, although we had only been living under the same roof for less than two. There were those who looked at me differently now, as if wondering how a man who had lost his wife and daughter under such terrible circumstances less than three years before could bring himself to begin again, could create another child and attempt to find a place for it in a world that had spawned a killer capable of tearing a daughter and her mother apart.

  But if I had not tried, if I had not reached out to another person and made some small, halting connection to her in the hope that it might one day bring us closer together, then the Traveling Man, the creature that had taken them away from me, would have won. I could not change the fact that we had all suffered at his hands, but I refused to be his victim for the rest of my life.

  And this woman was, in her quiet way, extraordinary. She had seen in me something worthy of love, of salvation, and had set about recovering that thing from the deep place to which it had retreated in order to protect itself from further harm. She was not so naive as to believe that she could save me: rather, she made me want to save myself.

  Rachel had been shocked when she discovered that she was pregnant. We both were, a little, in the beginning, but it seemed even then that there was a rightness to it, an appropriateness, that allowed us to face our new future with a kind of quiet confidence. It sometimes felt like the decision to have a child had been made for us by some higher power, and all we could do now was hang on and enjoy the ride. Well, maybe Rachel wouldn’t have used the word “enjoy”: after all, it was she who had felt a strange heaviness to all her actions from the moment the test had proved positive; she who stared at her figure in alarm as she began to put on weight in strange places; she whom I found crying at the kitchen table in the dead of one August night, overcome by feelings of dread and sadness and exhaustion; she who threw up every morning with all the certainty of sunrise; and she who would sit, her hand upon her belly, listening to the spaces between her heartbeats with both fear and wonder, as if she could hear the little bundle of cells slowly growing within her. The first trimester had been especially difficult for her. Now, in her second, she had found new reserves of energy initiated for her by the child’s first kicks, by the confirmation that what lay inside her was no longer potential but had become actual.

  While I watched her quietly, Rachel tore into a piece of beef so rare she had to hold it down with her fork to keep it from making a break for the door. Beside it, potatoes and carrots and zucchini lay heaped in little mountains.

  “Why aren’t you eating?” she asked, when she came up briefly for air.

  I curled my arm protectively around my plate. “Back,” I said. “Bad dog.”

  To my left, Walt’s head spun toward me, a brief flash of confusion visible in his eyes. “Not you,” I reassured him, and his tail wagged.

  Rachel finished chewing, then jabbed her momentarily empty fork at me. “It was that call today. Am I right?”

  I nodded and toyed with my food, then told her Elliot’s story. “He’s in trouble,” I concluded. “And anyone who sides with him against Earl Larousse is going to be in trouble too.”

  “Have you ever met Larousse?”

  “No. The only reason I know about him is because Elliot has told me things in the past.”

  “Bad things?”

  “Nothing worse than you’d expect from a man with more money than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people in the state: intimidation, bribery, crooked land deals, brushes with the EPA over polluted rivers and poisoned fields, the usual stuff. Throw a stone in Washington when Congress is in session and you’ll hit apologists for any one of a hundred people like him. But that doesn’t make the loss of his daughter any less painful for him.”

  An image of Irv Blythe flashed briefly in my mind. I swatted the thought away like a fly.

  “And Norton is certain that his client didn’t kill her?”

  “Seems that way. After all, he took over the case from the original lawyer and then stood bail for the guy, and Elliot isn’t the kind of man who risks his money or his reputation on a losing prospect. Then again, a black man accused of the murder of a rich white girl could be at risk among the general population, assuming somebody got it into his head to make a name for himself with the grieving family. According to Elliot, he either bailed his client or he buried him. Those were the options.”

  “When is the trial?”

  “Soon.” I had gone through the newspaper reports of the murder on the Internet, and it was clear that the case had been fast-tracked from the beginning. Marianne Larousse had been dead for only a few months, but the case would be tried early in the new year. The law didn’t like to keep people like Earl Larousse waiting.

  We stared at each other across the table.

  “We don’t need the money,” said Rachel. “Not that badly.”

  “I know.”

  “And you don’t want to go down there.”

  “No, I sure don’t.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Eat your dinner, before I do.”

  I did as I was told. I even tasted some of it.

  It tasted like ash.

  After dinner, we drove out to Len Libby’s on Route 1 and sat on a bench outside to eat our ice cream. Len Libby’s used to be on Spurwink Road, on the way to Higgins Beach, with tables inside where people sat and shot the breeze. It had moved out to its new location, on the highway, a few years back, and while the ice cream was still good, eating it while looking out at four lanes of traffic wasn’t quite the same. Instead, there was now a life-size chocolate moose beside the ice cream counter, which probably counted as some form of progress.

  Rachel and I didn’t speak. The sun set behind us, our shad
ows growing longer before us, stretching away ahead of us like our hopes and fears for the future.

  “You see the paper today?” she asked.

  “No, I didn’t get a chance.”

  She picked up her bag and rummaged through it until she found the piece she had kept from the Press Herald, then handed it to me. “I don’t know why I tore it out,” she said. “I knew you’d have to see it sometime, but part of me didn’t want you to have to read about him again. I’m tired of seeing his name.”

  I unfolded the paper.

  Thomaston-The Rev. Aaron Faulkner will remain at Thomaston State Prison until his trial, a Department of Corrections spokesman said yesterday. Faulkner, indicted earlier this year on charges of conspiracy and murder, was transferred to Thomaston from the state Supermax facility a month ago, following what appeared to be a failed suicide attempt.

  Faulkner was arrested in Lubec in May of this year following a confrontation with Scarborough-based private detective Charlie Parker, during which two people, a male calling himself Elias Pudd and an unnamed female, were killed. DNA tests revealed that the dead man was in fact Faulkner’s son, Leonard. The woman was identified as Muriel Faulkner, the preacher’s daughter.

  Faulkner was formally indicted in May for the murders of the Aroostook Baptists, the religious group headed by the preacher that disappeared from its settlement at Eagle Lake in January 1964, and conspiracy to murder at least four other named individuals, among them industrialist Jack Mercier.

  The remains of the Aroostook Baptists were uncovered close by Eagle Lake April last. Officials in Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts may also be examining unsolved cases in which Faulkner and his family were allegedly involved, although no attempt has yet been made to charge Faulkner outside Maine.

  According to sources within the Maine attorney general’s office, both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI are also examining Faulkner’s case, with a view of trying him on federal charges.

  Faulkner’s attorney, James Grimes, told reporters yesterday he remained concerned for the health and well-being of his client and he was considering appealing to the State Supreme Court following the decision of a Washington County Superior Court to refuse bail. Faulkner has said he is innocent of all charges and was kept a virtual prisoner by his family for almost forty years.

  Meanwhile, the consultant entomologist employed by investigators to catalogue the collection of insects and spiders found at the Lubec compound occupied by Faulkner and his two children told the Press Herald yesterday that he had almost completed his work. According to a state police spokesman, the collection is believed to have been assembled by Leonard Faulkner, alias “Elias Pudd,” over many years.

  “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 wa
sn’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.”