The White Road

by John Connolly

  “Sure, no problem. I’ll do it myself, when I can. You think she’d agree to a panic button?”

  I thought about it. It would probably require U.N.-level diplomatic skills, but I figured Rachel might eventually come around. “Probably. You got someone in mind to install it?”

  “I know a guy. Give me a call when you’ve talked to her.”

  I thanked him and rose to leave. I got about three steps when his voice stopped me.

  “Hey, she doesn’t have any single friends, does she?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I replied, just before the ground crumbled beneath my feet and I realized what I had let myself in for. MacArthur’s face brightened as mine fell.

  “Oh, no. What am I, a dating agency?”

  “Hey, come on, it’s the least you can do.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll ask. I can’t promise anything.”

  I left MacArthur with a smile on his face.

  A smile, and lots of frosting.

  For the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon I did some wrap-ups on outstanding paperwork, billed two clients, then went over my meager notes on Cassie Blythe. I had spoken to her ex-boyfriend, her closest friends, and her work colleagues, as well as to the recruitment company she had gone to visit in Bangor on the day that she had disappeared. Her car was being serviced so she had taken the bus to Bangor, leaving the Greyhound depot at the corner of Congress and St. John at about 8 A.M. According to the police reports and Sundquist’s follow-ups, the driver recalled her and remembered exchanging a few words with her. She had spent an hour with the recruitment company in its offices at West Market Square, before browsing in BookMarcs bookstore. One of the staff remembered her asking about signed Stephen King books.

  Then Cassie Blythe had disappeared. The return portion of her ticket was unused and there was no record of her using any other bus company or taking one of the commuter flights south. Her credit card and ATM card had not been used since the date of her disappearance. I was running out of people to chase down and I was getting nowhere.

  It seemed like I wasn’t going to find Cassie Blythe, alive or dead.

  * * *

  The black Lexus pulled up outside the house shortly after three. I was upstairs at my computer, printing off the stories on Marianne Larousse’s murder. Most of them were pretty uninformative, except for one short piece in the State detailing the fact that Elliot Norton had taken over the defense of Atys Jones from the assistant public defender appointed to his case, a man named Laird Rhine. There had been no motion for substitution filed, which meant that Rhine had agreed with Elliot to step aside. In a short comment, Elliot told the journalist that, while Rhine was a fine lawyer, Jones stood a better chance with his own attorney than a time-pressed public defender. Rhine gave no comment. The piece was a couple of weeks old. I was printing if off just as the Lexus arrived.

  The man who stepped from the passenger seat wore paint-stained Reebok sneakers, paint-stained blue jeans, and just to complete the ensemble, a paint-stained denim shirt. He looked like the runway model for a decorators’ convention, assuming that the decorators’ tastes veered toward five-six, semiretired gay burglars. Now that I thought of it, when I lived in the East Village there were any number of decorators whose tastes veered in that direction.

  The driver of the car was at least a foot taller than his partner and was getting the last wear out of his summer wardrobe of oxblood loafers and a tan linen suit. His black skin shone in the sunlight, obscured only by the faintest growth of hair on his scalp and a circular beard around his pursed lips.

  “Now, this place is a whole lot nicer than that other dump you called home,” said Louis when I went down to greet them.

  “If you hated it so much, why did you bother visiting?”

  “’Cause it got you pissed.”

  I reached out to shake Louis’s hand and found a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage thrust into my palm.

  “I don’t tip,” he said.

  “I guessed that when I saw you were too cheap to fly up for the weekend.”

  His eyebrow raised itself a fraction. “Hey, I work for you for free, I bring my own guns, and I pay for my own bullets. I can’t afford to take no plane up here.”

  “You still carrying an arsenal in the trunk of your car?”

  “Why, you need something?”

  “No, but if your car is hit by lightning I’ll know where my lawn went.”

  “Can’t be too careful. It’s a mean old world out there.”

  “You know, there’s a name for people who believe the world is out to get them: ‘paranoid.’”

  “Yeah, and there a name for people who don’t: ‘dead.’”

  He swept past me to where Rachel waited and hugged her gently. Rachel was the only person Louis ever showed any real affection toward. I could only assume that he occasionally patted Angel on the head. After all, they’d been together for almost six years.

  Angel appeared beside me. “I think he’s getting more charming as he gets older,” I told him.

  “He was any less charming he’d have claws, eight legs and a sting on the end of his tail,” he replied.

  “Wow, and he’s all yours.”

  “Yeah, ain’t I the lucky one?”

  Angel seemed to have grown suddenly older in the months since I had last seen him. There were pronounced lines around his eyes and mouth, and his black hair was now iced with gray. He even walked more slowly, as if afraid of the consequences of putting a foot wrong. I knew from Louis that he still endured a lot of pain with his back, where the preacher, Faulkner, had cut away a square of skin from between his shoulder blades and left him to bleed into an old tub. The transplants were taking but the scars hurt every time he moved. In addition, the two men were enduring a period of enforced separation. Angel’s direct involvement in the events leading up to Faulkner’s capture had inevitably drawn the attention of the law to him. He was now living in an apartment ten blocks away from Louis so that his partner did not fall within the ambit of their enquiries, since Louis’s past did not bear close examination by the forces of law and order. They were taking a chance even coming up here together, but it was Louis who had suggested it, and I was not about to argue with him. Maybe he felt that it would do Angel some good to be around other people who cared about him.

  Angel guessed what I was thinking, because he smiled ruefully. “Not looking so good, am I?”

  I smiled back. “You never looked good.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. Let’s go inside. You’re making me feel like an invalid.”

  I watched Rachel kiss him softly on the cheek and whisper something in his ear. For the first time since he had arrived, he laughed.

  But when she looked over his shoulder at me, Rachel’s eyes were filled with sorrow for him.

  We ate dinner in Katahdin, at the junction of Spring and High in Portland. Katahdin has mismatched furniture, eccentric decor, and feels like eating in somebody’s living room. Rachel and I love it. Unfortunately, so do a lot of other people, so we had to wait for a while at the cozy bar, listening to the locals who regularly eat there gossiping and chatting. Angel and Louis ordered a bottle of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay and I allowed myself a half glass. For a long time after the deaths of Jennifer and Susan I hadn’t touched alcohol. I had been in a bar on the night they died and had found a whole series of ways to torment myself for not being there when they needed me. Now I took an occasional beer and, on very special occasions, a glass of Flagstone wine at home. I didn’t miss drinking. My taste for alcohol had largely disappeared.

  We eventually got a table in a corner and started in on Katahdin’s excellent buttermilk rolls. We talked about Rachel’s pregnancy, dissed my furniture, and caught up on New York gossip over their seafood and my London broil.

  “Man, your house is full of old shit,” said Louis.

  “Antiques,” I corrected him. “They were my grandfather’s.”

  “I don’t care they were Moses’s, they
just old shit. You like one of them eBay motherfuckers, peddling trash on the Web. When you gonna make him buy some new furniture, girl?”

  Rachel raised her hands in an I’m-staying-out-of-it gesture, just as the hostess stepped up to make sure everything was okay. She smiled at Louis, who was slightly nonplussed to find that she wasn’t intimidated by him. Most people tended to find Louis intimidating at the very least, but the hostess at Katahdin was a strong, attractive woman who didn’t do intimidated, thank you for asking. Instead, she fed him more buttermilk rolls and gave him the kind of look a dog might give a particularly juicy bone.

  “I think she likes you,” said Rachel, radiating innocence.

  “I’m gay, not blind.”

  “But then, she doesn’t know you like we do,” I added. “Still, you’d better eat up. You’ll need all your strength for running away.”

  Louis scowled. Angel remained quiet, as he had for much of the day. He cheered up a little when talk turned to Willie Brew, who ran the auto shop in Queens that had supplied my Boss 302, and in which Angel and Louis were silent partners.

  “His son got some girl pregnant,” he told me.

  “Which son, Leo?”

  “No, the other one, Nicky. The one who’s like an idiot savant, minus the savant.”

  “Is he going to do the right thing?”

  “Already has. He ran away to Canada. Girl’s father is seriously pissed. Guy’s name is Pete Drakonis, but everybody calls him Jersey Pete. You know, you don’t fuck with guys who’ve got a state as part of their names, except maybe Vermont. The guy’s got Vermont in his name, the only thing he’s gonna try to make you do is save the whales and drink chai tea.”

  Over coffee I told them about Elliot Norton and his client. Angel shook his head wearily. “South Carolina,” he said, “is not my favorite place.”

  “An official Gay Pride Day march is some way off,” I admitted.

  “Where’d you say this guy’s from?” asked Louis.

  “A town called Grace Falls. It’s up by-”

  “I know where it’s at,” he replied.

  There was something in his voice that made me stop talking. Even Angel gave him a look, but didn’t press the point. We just watched as Louis fragmented a piece of discarded roll between his thumb and forefinger.

  “When you planning on leavin’?” he asked me.

  “Sunday.” Rachel and I had discussed it and agreed that my conscience was unlikely to rest unless I went down for a couple of days at least. At the risk of developing a roughly Rachel-shaped hole in my body where she had gone through me for a short cut, I had raised the subject of my conversation with MacArthur. To my surprise, she had agreed to both regular drop-bys and panic buttons in the kitchen and main bedroom.

  Incidentally, she had also agreed to find MacArthur a date.

  Louis appeared to consult some kind of mental calendar.

  “Meet you down there,” he said.

  “We’ll meet you down there,” corrected Angel.

  Louis glanced at him. “I got something I got to do first,” he said. “Along the way.”

  Angel flicked at a crumb. “I got nothing else planned,” he replied. His voice was studiedly neutral.

  The conversation seemed to have taken a turn down a strange road, and I wasn’t about to ask for a map. Instead, I called for the check.

  “You want to hazard a guess as to what that was about?” Rachel asked as we walked to my car, Angel and Louis ahead of us, unspeaking.

  “No,” I answered. “But I get the feeling that somebody is going to be very unhappy that those two ever left New York.”

  I just hoped that it wouldn’t be me.

  That night, I awoke to a noise from downstairs. I left Rachel sleeping, pulled on a robe, and went down to find the front door slightly ajar. Outside, Angel sat on the porch seat, dressed in sweatpants and an old Doonesbury T-shirt, his bare feet stretched out before him. He had a glass of milk in his hand as he looked out over the moonlit marsh. From the west came the cry of a screech owl, rising and falling in pitch. There was a pair nesting in the Black Point Cemetery. Sometimes, at night, the headlights of the car would catch them ascending toward the treetops, a vole or mouse still struggling in their claws.

  “Owls keeping you awake?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at me, and there was a little of the old Angel in his smile. “The silence is keeping me awake. The hell do you sleep in all this quiet?”

  “I can go beep my horn and swear in Arabic if you think it will help.”

  “Gee, would you?”

  Around us, mosquitoes danced, waiting for their chance to descend. I took some matches from the windowsill and lit a mosquito coil, then sat down beside him. He offered me his glass.

  “Milk?”

  “No thanks. I’m trying to give it up.”

  “You’re right. That calcium’ll kill ya.”

  He sipped his milk.

  “You worried about her?”

  “Who, Rachel?”

  “Yeah, Rachel. Who’d you think I was asking about, Chelsea Clinton?”

  “She’s fine. But I hear Chelsea’s doing well in college, so that’s good too.”

  A smile fluttered at his lips, like the brief beating of butterfly wings.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know. Sometimes, yes, I’m afraid. I get so scared that I come out here in the darkness and I look down on the marsh and I pray. I pray that nothing happens to Rachel and our child. Frankly, I think I’ve done my share of suffering. We all have. I’m kind of hoping the book is closed for a while.”

  “Place like this, on a night like tonight, maybe lets you believe that could happen,” he said. “It’s pretty here. Peaceful too.”

  “You thinking of retiring here? If you are, I’ll have to move again.”

  “Nah, I like the city too much. But this is kind of restful, for a change.”

  “I have snakes in my woodshed.”

  “Don’t we all? What are you going to do about them?”

  “Leave them alone. Hope they go away, or that something else kills them for me.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then I’ll have to deal with them myself. You want to tell me why you’re out here?”

  “My back hurts,” he said simply. “Places on my thighs where they took the skin from, they hurt too.”

  In his eyes I could see the night shapes reflected so clearly that it was as if they were a part of him, the elements of a darker world that had somehow entered and colonized his soul.

  “I still see them, you know, that fucking preacher and his son, holding me down while they cut away at me. He whispered to me, you know that? That fucking Pudd, he whispered to me, rubbed my brow, told me that it was all okay, while his old man cut me. Every time I stand or stretch, I feel that blade on my skin and I hear him whispering and it brings me back. And when that happens, the hate comes flooding back with it. I’ve never felt hate like it before.”

  “It fades,” I said quietly.

  “Does it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it doesn’t go away?”

  “No. It’s yours. You do with it what you have to do.”

  “I want to kill someone.” He said it without feeling, in level tones, the way somebody might announce that they were going to take a cold shower on a warm day.

  Louis was the killer, I thought. It didn’t matter that he killed for motives that went beyond money or politics or power; that he was no longer morally neutral; that whatever he might have done in the past, those he now chose to destroy went largely unmourned. Louis had it in him to take a life and not lose a moment’s sleep over it.

  Angel was different. When he’d been placed in situations where it was kill or be killed, then he had taken lives. It troubled him to do it, but better to be troubled above ground than to be untroubled below, and I had personal reasons to be thankful for his actions. Now Faulkner had destroyed something inside Angel, so
me small dam that he had constructed for himself behind which was contained all of his sorrow and hurt and rage at the things that had been done to him throughout his life. I knew only fragments of it-abuse, starvation, rejection, violence-but I was now beginning to realize the consequences of its release.

  “But you still won’t testify against him, if they ask,” I said.

  I knew the deputy DA was debating the wisdom of calling Angel for the trial, particularly given the fact that they would have to subpoena him to do it. Angel wasn’t one for making voluntary visits to courtrooms.

  “I wouldn’t make such a great witness.”

  This was true but I didn’t know how much I should tell him about the case against Faulkner, about how weak it was and how there were fears that it might collapse entirely without more hard evidence. As the newspaper report had pointed out, Faulkner was claiming that he had been a virtual prisoner of his son and daughter for four decades; that they alone were responsible for the deaths of his flock and a series of attacks against groups and individuals whose beliefs differed from their own; and that they had brought skin and bone from their victims to him and forced him to preserve them as relics. It was the classic defense of “The dead guys done it.”

  “You know where Caina is?” asked Angel.

  “Nope.”

  “It’s in Georgia. Louis was born near there. On our way to South Carolina, we’re going to make a stop in Caina. Just so you know.”

  There was something in his eyes as he spoke, a fierce burning. I recognized it instantly, for I had seen it in my own eyes in the past. He rose and turned his face from me to hide the evidence of the pain, then walked to the screen door.

  “It won’t solve anything,” I said.

  He paused.

  “Who cares?”

  The next morning Angel hardly spoke at breakfast, and the little that he did say was not directed at me. Our conversation on the porch had not brought us any closer. Instead, it had confirmed the existence of a growing divide between us, an estrangement acknowledged by Louis before they departed.

  “You two talk last night?” he asked.