“I turned him down. I couldn’t give him help when he asked for it.”
“He understood. He didn’t blame you. He still doesn’t. Neil was lost to him. Ellis knew that, but he loved him. When I told Ellis about Merrick, he said that I should talk to you. He’s not the kind of man to bear a grudge.”
She released her hold on my arm. “Do you think they’ll ever get the men who killed Neil?” she asked.
“Man,” I said. “It was one man who was responsible. His name was Donnie P.”
“Will anything ever be done about it?”
“Something was done,” I said.
She stared at me silently for a time.
“Does Ellis know?” she asked.
“Would it help him if he did?”
“No, I don’t think so. Like I told you, he’s not that kind of man.”
Her eyes shone, and something uncurled itself deep inside her, stretching sinuously, its mouth soft and red.
“But you are,” she said, “aren’t you?”
We found the girl in a glorified kennel in Independence, east of Kansas City and within sight and sound of a small airport. Our information had been good. The girl didn’t open the door when I knocked. Angel, small and apparently unthreatening, was beside me and Louis, tall, dark and very, very threatening, was at the back of the house in case she tried to run. We could hear someone moving inside. I knocked again.
“Who’s there?” The voice sounded cracked and strained.
“Mia?” I said.
“There’s nobody called Mia here.”
“We want to help you.”
“I told you: there’s no Mia here. You have the wrong address.”
“He’s coming for you, Mia. You can’t keep one step ahead of him forever.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Donnie, Mia. He’s closing in, and you know it.”
“Who are you? Cops?”
“You ever hear of a guy named Neil Chambers?”
“No. Why would I have?”
“Donnie killed him over a bad debt.”
“So?”
“He left him in a ditch. He tortured him, then he shot him. He’ll do the same to you, except in your case nobody is going to come knocking on doors to try to even things out later. Not that it will matter to you. You’ll be dead. If we can find you, then he can find you too. You don’t have much time left.”
There was no reply for so long that I thought she might have slipped away from the door. Then there was the sound of a security chain being removed, and the door was unlocked. We stepped into semidarkness. All the drapes were closed, and no lights burned in the room. The door slammed shut behind us and the girl named Mia retreated into the shadows so that we couldn’t see her face, the face that Donnie P. had beaten on for some offense that she had given him, real or imagined.
“Can we sit down?” I asked.
“You can sit, if you like,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not so much, but I look bad.” Her voice cracked further. “Who told you I was here?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“Someone who’s concerned for you. That’s all you need to know.”
“What do you want?”
“We want you to tell us why Donnie did this to you. We want you to share what you know about him.”
“What makes you think I know something?”
“Because you’re hiding from him, and because the word is he wants to find you before you talk.”
My eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom. I could make out some of her features now. They looked distorted, her nose misshapen and her cheeks swollen. A shard of light from beneath the door caught the edge of her bare feet and the hem of a long red dressing gown. The varnish on her toenails was red too. It looked freshly applied. She removed a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of her gown, tapped one out, and lit it with a cigarette lighter. She kept her head down, her hair hanging over her face, but I still caught a glimpse of the scars that ran across her chin and her left cheek.
“I should have kept my mouth shut,” she said softly.
“Why?”
“He came around and threw two grand in my face. After all that he’d done to me, a lousy two grand. I was angry. I told one of the other girls that I had a way of getting even with him. I told her that I’d seen something I shouldn’t have. Next I hear, she’s sharing Donnie’s bed. Donnie was right. I am just a dumb whore.”
“Why didn’t you go to the cops with what you know?”
She drew on the cigarette. Her head was no longer lowered. Absorbed by the details of her story, she had briefly forgotten to hide her face from us. Beside me, I heard Angel hiss in sympathy as he caught sight of her ruined features.
“Because they wouldn’t have done anything about it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh, but I do,” she said.
She took another drag on the cigarette and toyed with her hair. Nobody said anything. Eventually, Mia broke the silence.
“So now you say you’re going to help me.”
“That’s right.”
“How?”
“Look outside. Back window.”
She put her hand to her face and stared at me for a moment, then walked to the kitchen. I heard a soft swishing sound as she parted the curtains. When she returned, her demeanor had changed. Louis had that effect on people, especially if it seemed like he might be on their side.
“Who is he?”
“A friend.”
“He looks…” She tried to find the right word. “…intimidating,” she said at last.
“He is intimidating.”
She tapped her foot on the floor. “Is he going to kill Donnie?”
“We were hoping to find another way of dealing with him. We thought that you might be able to assist us.”
We waited for her to make her decision. There was a TV on in another room, probably her bedroom. It struck me that she might not be alone, and that we should have checked the house first, but it was too late now. Finally, she reached into the pocket of her gown and withdrew her cell phone. She tossed it across the room to me. I caught it.
“Open the picture file,” she said. “The ones you want are five or six photos in.”
I flicked through images of young women smiling together at a dinner table, of a black dog in a yard, and a baby in a high chair, until I came to the pictures of Donnie. The first showed him standing in a car park with another man, taller than he was and wearing a gray suit. The second and third pictures were different shots of the same scene, but this time the faces of the two men were a little clearer. The photos had been taken from inside a car because the frame of a door and a wing mirror were visible in two of them.
“Who is the second man?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I followed Donnie because I thought he was cheating on me. Hell, I knew he was cheating on me. He’s a dog. I just wanted to find out who he was cheating with.”
She smiled. The effort seemed to cause her pain.
“You see, I thought I loved him. How stupid is that?”
She shook her head. I could tell that she was crying.
“And this is what you have on him? This is why he wants to find you: because you have pictures of him on your phone with a man whose name you don’t know?”
“I don’t know his name, but I know where he works. When Donnie left him, the guy was joined by two other people, a woman and a man. They’re in the next picture.”
I flicked on, and saw the trio. They were all dressed for business.
“I thought they looked like cops,” said Mia. “They got in the car and drove away. I stayed with them.”
“Where did they go?”
“Thirteen hundred Summit.”
And then I knew why Donnie wanted Mia found, and why she couldn’t go to the cops with what she had.
Thirteen hundred Summit was the FBI’s Kansas City field office.
Donnie P. was an informer.
In a field off a deserted road in Clay County, where cars rarely traveled and only birds kept vigil, Donnie P., the man who killed Neil Chambers over a meat-and-potatoes debt, now lay buried in a shallow grave. It had taken one phone call to his bosses, one phone call and a handful of blurred photographs sent from an untraceable email account.
It was revenge, revenge for a boy I barely knew. His father wasn’t aware of what had happened, and I would not tell him, which raised the question of why I had done it. It didn’t matter to Neil Chambers, and it wouldn’t bring him back to his father. I guess I did it because I needed to strike out at something, at someone. I chose Donnie P., and he died for it.
As Rebecca Clay said, I was that kind of man.
That night, I sat on my porch, with Walter asleep at my feet. I wore a sweater under my jacket, and drank coffee from a Mustang travel cup that Angel had given me as a birthday present. The plumes of my breath mingled with the steam that rose from the coffee with each sip. The sky was dark, and there was no moon to guide the way through the marshes, no light to turn its channels to silver. The air was still, but there was no peace to the stillness, and once again I was aware of a faint smell of burning in the distance.
And then everything changed. I couldn’t say how, or why, but I sensed the sleeping life around me wake for an instant, the natural world troubled by a new presence yet afraid to move for fear of attracting attention to itself. Birds beat their wings in a flurry of concern, and rodents froze in the shadows cast by tree trunks. Walter’s eyes opened, and his muzzle twitched warily. His tail beat nervously upon the boards, then abruptly ceased, for even that slight disturbance in the night seemed too much.
I stood, and Walter whined. I walked to the porch rail and felt a breeze arise from the east, blowing in across the marshes, troubling the trees and causing the grass to flatten slightly as it passed over the blades. It should have brought with it the smell of sea, but it did not. Instead, there was only the scent of burning, stronger now, and then that faded, to be replaced by a dry stench, as of a hole in the ground that had recently been opened to reveal the hunched, wretched thing lying dead in the earth. I thought of dreams that I had had, dreams of a great mass of souls following the shining pathways of the marshes to lose themselves at last in the sea, like the molecules of river water drawn inexorably to the place where all things were born.
But now something had emerged, traveling from, not to, moving away from that world and into this one. The wind appeared to separate, as though it had encountered some obstacle and been forced to seek alternative paths around it, but it did not come together again. Its constituent parts flowed away in different directions, then, as suddenly as it had arisen, it was gone, and there was only that lingering odor to indicate that it had ever existed. Just for a moment, I thought I caught sight of a presence among the trees to the east, the figure of a man in an old tan coat, the details of his features lost in the gloom, his eyes and mouth dark patches against the pallor of his skin. Then just as quickly he was gone, and I wondered if I had truly seen anything at all.
Walter rose to his feet and walked to the porch door, using his paw to ease it open before disappearing into the safety of the house. I stayed, waiting for the night creatures to settle once more. I sipped at my coffee, but now it tasted bitter. I walked onto the lawn and emptied my cup on the grass. Above me, the attic window at the top of the house moved slightly in its frame, the rattle that it made causing me to turn around. It could have been the house settling, adjusting itself after the sudden breeze, but as I looked up at the window, the clouds briefly parted and moonlight at last shone upon the glass, creating the impression of movement in the room beyond. Then the clouds came together again, and the movement ceased a fraction after.
Just a fraction.
I went back inside and took the flashlight from the kitchen. I checked the batteries, then climbed the stairs to the top of the house. Using a hook on the end of a pole, I pulled down the steps leading to the attic. The light from the hallway penetrated reluctantly into the space, revealing the edges of forgotten things. I climbed up.
This attic was used for storage, nothing more. There were still some of Rachel’s things here, packed away into a pair of old suitcases. I kept meaning to send them on to her, or to take them with me when next I visited her and Sam, but to do so would be to admit, finally, that she was not coming back. I had left Sam’s cot as it was in her room for the same reason, another link to them that I did not wish to see disappear.
But there were other items here, too, belonging to those who preceded Rachel and Sam: clothes and toys, photographs and drawings, even gold and diamond jewelry. I had not kept much, but what I did keep was here.
afraid
I could almost hear the word spoken, as though a child’s voice had whispered softly in my ear, fearful of being heard yet anxious to communicate. Something small scuttled through the darkness, disturbed by the coming of the light.
They were not real. That was what I told myself again. A fragment of my sanity was jarred loose on the night that I found them, the night that they were taken from me. My mind was shaken up and was never the same again. They were not real. I created them. I conjured them up out of grief and loss.
They were not real.
But I could not convince myself, for I did not believe that it was true. I knew that this was their place, the refuge of the lost wife and the lost daughter. Whatever traces of them remained in this world clung tenaciously to the possessions stored amid the dirt and cobwebs, the fragments and relics of lives now almost gone from this world.
The flashlight chased shadows across the wall and floor. A thin layer of dust lay over everything: on boxes and cases, on old crates and old books. My nose and throat itched, and my eyes began to water.
afraid
That patina of dust lay also on the glass of the window, but it was not undisturbed. The flashlight picked out lines upon it as I approached, a pattern that formed itself into a message, carefully drawn in what might have been a child’s hand.
make them go away
My fingers touched the glass, tracing the curves and the uprights, following the shapes of the letters. There were tears in my eyes, but I could not tell if it was the dust that brought them or the possibility that here, in this room filled with regret and loss, I had found some trace of a child long gone, that her finger had made these letters and that, by touching them, I might in turn touch something of her.
please, daddy
I stood back. The flashlight’s beam showed me the dirt upon my fingers, and all of my doubts returned. Were the letters really there before I came, written by another who lived in this dark place, or had I given deeper meaning to random scratches upon the dirt perhaps left by Rachel or me, and in moving my finger upon them had somehow found a way to communicate something of which I was afraid, to give form and identity to a previously nameless fear? The rational side of me reasserted itself, erecting barricades and providing explanations, however unsatisfactory, for all that had occurred: for smells on the breeze, for a pale figure at the edge of the forest, for movement in the attic and words scratched in the dust.
Now the flashlight picked out the message, and I saw my face reflected in the glass, hovering in the night as though I were the unreal element, the lost being, so that the words were written across my features. so afraid.
They read:
HOLLOW MEN
Chapter VI
I slept badly that night, my dreams punctuated by recurrent images of eyeless men who yet could somehow see, and a faceless child curled up in ball in a darkened attic, whispering only the single word “afraid” to herself, over and over again. I checked in with Jackie Garner first thing. It had been a quiet night in Willard, and for that much I was grateful. Jenna had departed for D.C. with her grandparents shortly after seven, and Jackie had st
ayed with their car as far as Portsmouth while the Fulcis remained with Rebecca. There was no sign of Merrick, or of anyone else showing an unhealthy interest in the Clay family.
I went for a run to Prouts Neck, Walter racing ahead of me in the still morning air. This part of Scarborough was still relatively rural, the presence of the yacht club and the country club ensuring that the area retained a certain exclusivity, but elsewhere the town was changing rapidly. It had begun as far back as 1992, when Wal-Mart arrived near the Maine Mall, bringing with it minor irritations like the RV owners who were allowed to park overnight on the store’s lot. Soon, other big-box retailers followed Wal-Mart’s lead, and Scarborough started to become like many other satellite towns on the edge of larger cities. Now residents at Eight Corners were selling out to allow Wal-Mart to expand further, and, despite a cap on residential building permits, more and more families were moving into the area to take advantage of its schools and the town’s recreational pursuits, pushing property prices up and causing increases in taxes to pay for the infrastructure needed to support the new arrivals, who were taking root at four times the county average. In my darker moments, I sometimes saw what was once a fifty- four-square-mile town encompassing six distinct villages, each with its own distinct local identity, and the largest salt marsh in the state, becoming a single homogenous sprawl populated almost entirely by those with no concept of its history and no respect for its past.
There were two messages on my answering machine when I returned. One was from a guy in the DMV who charged me $50 for every search he ran on vehicle plates. According to him, Merrick’s car was a company vehicle recently registered to a law office down in Lynn, Massachusetts. I didn’t recognize the name of the firm, Eldritch and Associates. I scribbled the details on a notepad. Merrick could have stolen a lawyer’s car-and a call to the firm would quickly confirm whether or not a theft had occurred-or he might have been employed by the attorney or attorneys, which didn’t seem very likely. There was a third option: that the firm had provided Merrick with a car, either out of choice or at the instigation of a client, thereby offering at least some degree of protection if someone came around asking questions about what Merrick was doing, as the firm could offer client confidentiality as a defense. Unfortunately, if that was the case, the individual involved had underestimated Merrick ’s capacity for causing trouble, or just didn’t care.
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