The Woman in the Woods

by John Connolly

  The crow-man had family: children, a grandchild. So did the others. Only the Principal Backer was without heirs.

  “We have always been in a state of collusion,” said the Principal Backer. “The abstract now threatens to become concrete. But what did you expect?”

  “More time.”

  “It appears you may be denied it. Why do you think I booked L’Espalier for our meal?”

  “I believe,” said the crow-man, “that I may have lost my appetite.”

  The Principal Backer gripped him by the shoulder.

  “Then find it again,” he said. “This could be our Last Supper.”

  CHAPTER

  XLIX

  If the Principal Backer and his associates were ambivalent about the presence of the visitor, Quayle was no less eager to maintain his distance from these colonials. He regarded them as lacking purity: they acted largely out of self-interest, seeking to enrich themselves by subscribing to a doctrine in which they believed only halfheartedly, if they truly believed in it at all.

  Only the leader of their little group was worthy of any respect. There were those who suspected the Principal Backer to be black as pitch to the depths of his being, although Quayle had no idea what might have bred in him such hatred for his fellow men that the Principal Backer should be content to see them reduced to ash, and himself along with them. Quayle wondered if the Buried God whispered to the Principal Backer in the night, calling to him in a tongue ancient and unwritten, its words unintelligible but their meaning clear. If so, it might have gone some way toward explaining the Principal Backer’s animus toward Quayle, who served the rest of the Obverse Trinity.

  But Quayle had other doubts about the Principal Backer. Quayle possessed no evidence at which to point, no indications of irresolution or—whisper it—treachery on the part of the Principal Backer, only his knowledge of men and the depths of their self-interest. The Principal Backer was prosperous, and in good health. He was held in regard. He had authority.

  He had no reason to bring all of it to an end.

  Quayle, by contrast, was a soul in anguish, and wished only for that suffering to cease. If a way had existed to accomplish this other than through the restoration of the Atlas, Quayle might have embraced it without hesitation, or so he told himself. Quayle was a man convinced that he had lived for centuries, cursed—in an irony only a lawyer could properly appreciate—by a contract he should not have signed. He could recall moments of great import going back to the Reformation and beyond, intimate details of incidents and individuals about which he could not possibly have such knowledge. He was haunted by memories that seemed to belong both to him and to others, a succession of men who bore his name and likeness but could not possibly be him.

  Once again, as he did whenever he experienced doubt, he feared that these echoes were simply manifestations of mania, while the insight that permitted him to acknowledge his own lunacy represented a clarity that ebbed and flowed according to the patterns of his psychosis.

  Lies within lies: like the Backers, he would find no consolation in them.

  The Atlas was real.

  The Old God was real.

  The Buried God was real.

  The Not-Gods to come were real.

  And Quayle, in all his singularity, was real.

  CHAPTER

  L

  Parker spent part of the following morning in Augusta going through the relevant birth records for Piscataquis County. He managed to assemble a list of registrations from the period in question, but remained reluctant to go knocking on doors to ask about illegal burials and child abductions. Someone would shoot him.

  Terri Harkness, his contact at the Maine Town and City Clerks’ Association, agreed to inquire about birth certificate filings that might have raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t hold out much hope. Clerks took their roles seriously, she said, and nobody wanted a false filing to come back and bite. But she did admit that when it came to home births, they couldn’t do much more than take the word of the parent or parents, and she had personal knowledge of two very religious families in which grandparents were raising a grandchild as their own in order to protect a daughter from opprobrium.

  “And shouldn’t the police be asking these questions anyway?” said Harkness.

  “The clerk at the Vital Records Office in Augusta told me they’d already received a request from the state police for assistance, now that the search of the site is winding down,” said Parker, “but resources are likely to be stretched until they find Jasper Allen’s killers. My guess is that the police will be in touch with more of your members soon enough, but maybe I can save them some trouble.”

  “If you do figure out who has the child, you have to know they won’t be too pleased to see you.”

  “If I let the likely pleasure of my company guide my movements,” Parker told her, “I’d never leave the house.”

  * * *

  PUTNAM, NEWHOUSE, AND CALDICOTT had proved smarter than anyone might previously have credited, and had so far managed to evade the police. The general view was that Caldicott was the bright one, although it was all relative, given that he was a mid-level Maine drug dealer now being hunted as a possible accessory to the killing of a state trooper.

  If Caldicott was clever, Parker thought, he’d have ditched Putnam and Newhouse as quickly as possible and headed north or west. Parker’s guess was north—maybe into the County, as everyone in Maine called Aroostook, the largest territory in the state: almost 7,000 square miles, most of it uninhabited woodland. Caldicott knew the terrain; his people came from up Scopan way, close to the Allagash Wilderness. A man could lose himself in there and not be found until someone stumbled on his bones.

  But if Caldicott was really clever, and also ruthless, he’d have done more than ditch Putnam and Newhouse: he’d have killed them. Right now there was only the word of his girlfriend that he’d supplied the car used in the shooting, and the presence of Putnam and Newhouse at Caldicott’s place on the night in question didn’t directly link him to Allen’s death. While the distinction between being an accessory before or after the fact had largely been erased in law, the reality was that an accessory after the fact faced a lighter sentence. As things stood, Caldicott was only in trouble for knowingly assisting a suspected felon or felons in avoiding arrest or trial, unless the police investigation uncovered evidence linking him to the planning of the drug buy that had ultimately resulted in Allen’s murder. There was also the testimony of Caldicott’s junkie girlfriend to consider, although it appeared she had now lawyered up in order to counter any possibility of her own indictment as an accessory, and junkies made poor witnesses. Whatever happened, Caldicott was in trouble, but he might be in less trouble if Putnam and Newhouse were to vanish from the face of the earth.

  None of which was Parker’s problem.

  He returned to the matter of the dead woman. What did he know of her? She was probably from out of state, so how did she come to be in Maine? What drew her to the Northeast? She was pregnant, so it was possible that the father of the child was here. Yet somehow she ended up going into labor not in the safety of a hospital but out in the wild, and any witnesses to the birth and her subsequent passing had not seen fit to alert the authorities. Could the father of the child have been responsible for her burial? If so, why hide the body and the fact of the birth, unless he panicked when the woman died, fearing that the law might find a way to blame him for it. What if he was married, and the pregnancy the result of an affair? The lover shows up in his home state, heavy with his child, and he finds somewhere to accommodate her without his wife suspecting. When the lover dies giving birth, he gets rid of her and the baby and returns to his blameless life.

  But if that was so, why wasn’t the child buried with the mother?

  Parker rowed back. One certainty: this was a woman in trouble, because otherwise she would not have ended up in a hole in the woods. She was heavily pregnant, in an unfamiliar locale. To whom would she have turned? Pla
nned Parenthood, perhaps, or one of the women’s refuges, yet no such organization in the state had come forward to claim knowledge of her.

  Parker experienced a tickling at his memory, a detail from the past that was assuming new relevance in light of the current case. Then it came to him, and he made one final call, this time to Bangor. The person with whom he wished to speak was absent, and would not be back until nightfall. Parker left a message advising that he would travel up to talk to her in person the next day. He knew he could have spoken with her over the phone, but he had learned from long experience that people, even those with no grudge against him, were often more forthcoming when dealt with face-to-face.

  And anyway, he had other obligations that night.

  CHAPTER

  LI

  Quayle did not like bars, or not bars like this one: loud, convivial, and filled with staff that might remember a face. Quayle preferred older, darker watering holes, frequented by men and women who did not exchange glances or make conversation with those unknown to them, and only barely acknowledged those they did know; places with names originating from a time when the masses could not read, and inns were identifiable by their signs.

  But perhaps in those London hostelries that had been in the same family for generations, a landlord might remark to his son or daughter, as they cleaned glasses or pulled pints, that the customer seated in the corner (“a legal gentleman, if memory serves”) enjoyed a similar hereditary link to their beloved establishment, for this man’s father used to drink here, and indeed his father before him (“for they bear the same likeness, which speaks of a strong bloodline”), even if the appellation of this august lineage of clientele would not quite come to the innkeeper (“something to do with birds, I’m sure of it”), and it would never cross his mind to ask, because he was certain that this gentleman (“keeps himself to himself, but pleasant enough with it”) would not welcome such inquiries, and perhaps the reason he and his forebears had offered their patronage down the years was precisely this discretion on the part of a long line of landlords (“for we know when to look, and when to look away”), and so it should remain.

  Therefore Quayle felt unusually conspicuous in a booth at the Great Lost Bear in Portland, even with Mors keeping vigil from the bar, the stools at either side of her curiously unoccupied despite the presence of a large crowd, and with seating at a premium. Quayle waited with a gin before him, although he had barely touched it. He had no desire to be here, and therefore drinking would give him no pleasure. This whole country was encrusting him, like dust falling in the aftermath of an eruption. He wanted to be done with it.

  A man made his way through the throng, his body undulating so that, no matter how densely packed the masses, he passed between all without difficulty. He was small and slim, but had learned to make himself less noticeable still. He was dressed in an overcoat that looked older than he, its sleeves hanging below his knuckles, its hem frayed. His eyes were brown and hooded, and his hair very dark and full, its line so close to his eyebrows that he barely possessed a forehead at all. His nose was tiny, and pointed. Combined with the coat, and the swift precision of his movements, these features lent him the aspect of a clever rodent. Quayle caught him peruse Mors and hold the look she gave him, and Quayle thought that the Principal Backer must have described her to the new arrival in forewarning. He held a large glass of soda in one hand, but he struck Quayle as being no more likely to finish it than Quayle was his gin. He took the facing seat in the booth without asking permission, and placed his glass on a coaster. He did not offer a hand in greeting, and Quayle surmised that this, too, the Principal Backer might have mentioned to him: Mr. Quayle prefers not to shake hands. You should probably be grateful for it, otherwise you might never remove the chill from your fingers, assuming Quayle leaves you with as many of them as before.

  “You’re the Englishman.”

  No names, no preamble. His voice was too high for a grown male, and curiously without accent. He could have been from anywhere, anywhere at all.

  “Yes,” said Quayle.

  “You like this place?”

  “No,” said Quayle. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Because you’re looking for the child.” With the tiniest nod of that ratlike head, he indicated a man at the other side of the bar, engaged in conversation with an older, bearded figure. “And so is he.”

  * * *

  IT WAS DAVE EVANS’S birthday, and various friends had gathered to wish the owner of the Great Lost Bear well. With Angel and Louis indisposed, and the Fulci brothers acting as temporary bodyguards for the invalid, it was particularly incumbent on Parker to be present. Not that this was in any way a chore, because he owed Dave a lot. Dave had offered Parker a bar manager’s job back when times were hard, both personally and financially, and the Bear still functioned as Parker’s de facto meeting place and occasional office.

  “You hear the Fulcis are looking to open a bar of their own?” he remarked to Dave.

  “I thought it was just a rumor, like trickle-down economics.”

  “No, they sound serious. They have the money, and I hear they’ve put a marker somewhere on Washington Avenue.”

  “That’s too close to us,” said Dave.

  Washington Avenue was right at the other side of town from the Bear.

  “How far away do you want them to be?” asked Parker.

  “Africa. Antarctica. Somewhere else beginning with ‘A,’ like Alpha Centauri.”

  Parker did his best to look hurt on the Fulcis’ behalf.

  “You know, too much of that kind of talk and they’ll get to thinking you don’t like them. That would be bad.”

  “How much worse could it be?” said Dave. “They already drink here.”

  “You still have a roof. And walls.”

  “Just about.”

  Over by the men’s room, a fist-shaped hole marked the spot where Paulie Fulci had chosen to express his unhappiness at the result of a recent hockey game. Parker hadn’t been present on the night in question, but according to regulars, the whole bar shook.

  Dave mulled on the Fulcis for a while. His face brightened.

  “If they open their own place,” he said, “maybe they’ll drink there instead.”

  Parker decided to cut that one off at the pass.

  “You’re clutching at straws. The Bear is like a second home to them, and you should never drink in your own establishment. Look on the bright side: you haven’t had any trouble since they started coming here.”

  “But we didn’t have any trouble before they started coming here, either. I think they interfere with my blood pressure. They arrive and I feel the urge to lie down.”

  “You could always just retire and sell them the Bear.”

  “It would be like handing my child over to pirates.”

  “Go on, admit it: you kind of enjoy them.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “You’d miss them if they were gone.”

  “I’d welcome the opportunity to find out.”

  Parker called for another drink, and took in the bar, the other customers, and the two men in a booth by the wall. He had caught both of them peering at him moments earlier, in a manner that was something more than casual—or so it seemed to Parker, and he had learned long ago not to ignore his instincts on such matters. The man in velvet was older, and unknown to him, but the smaller one made his skin crawl, and his face was familiar.

  “The guys in the next-to-last booth by the wall,” he said to Dave. “One dresses off a frequent-buyer card at Goodwill, the other like he got lost on the way to a séance. Know them?”

  Dave didn’t even need to look in their direction. This was why Dave was good at what he did, and the Bear ran so smoothly.

  “Velvet Goldmine, no. But the smaller one, he’s been here in the past. Not often, but enough for me to learn not to like him.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “His attitude, mostly. Other than that: pure p
rejudice. He’s usually alone, but always on the periphery of someone else’s business. He’s the kind of guy who likes watching kids search for lost pets, because he’s the one who makes sure the pets were lost to begin with. Why?”

  “I got the feeling they’re paying me more than passing attention.”

  “Well, you’re a handsome man.”

  “I won’t argue with you on your birthday. The little one—I don’t think it’s the first time he’s given me the bad-luck squint in this place. That may be why he’s ringing my bells.”

  “I get the feeling you’re about to make a more formal introduction.”

  Parker patted Dave on the shoulder.

  “Well, this is a friendly place.”

  * * *

  QUAYLE WAS LISTENING INTENTLY to the little man, who had finally admitted to a name: Ivan Giller. Quayle didn’t particularly care to find out anything more about him. All he wanted from Giller was what he knew, or could find out, about Karis Lamb and her child.

  And now also the private investigator named Parker.

  “He was on TV, visiting the burial site,” said Giller. “The reporter made a fuss about it. Slow news day, I guess.”

  “And you’ve come across him before?”

  “Not one-on-one, but our mutual acquaintances pay me to keep an eye on him, and I pass on anything worth knowing. Not that I have to, most of the time. They learn about the big stuff without my help. If there’s trouble, he’ll find it. If there isn’t trouble, he’ll make some, just for a way to pass a few hours.”

  “Has he made any of this trouble for these acquaintances?”

  “It’s an ongoing project for him, which is why I’m still here.”

  “The more pertinent question is why is he still here?”

  “You mean, why isn’t he dead? People have tried.”

  “Clearly not hard enough.”

  “You’d be surprised. You—”