‘Hey, is that . . .
Abba
?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so.’ He trotted to the stereo and picked up a CD case. ‘Susanna, uh, I think it’s pronounced “Wallumrød,” with a weird line through the ø. It’s my girlfriend’s, but I can only play it at certain times of the day, usually when the place is quiet. It’s a management thing. Some people find it kind of depressing.’
It wasn’t depressing. It was soft, and sad, and haunting, but not depressing.
‘It’s a cover of an Abba song,’ I said. ‘‘Lay All Your Love on Me.” And please don’t ask me how I know that.’
‘Yeah, Abba? Don’t think I’m familiar with them.’
‘Swedish. Same neck of the woods as that Norwegian Count Whatever on your T-shirt, more or less. Not as big on church-burning, though, or not that I can recall.’
‘Yeah, the Count is one mean bastard. I just like the music, though. Music’s music, you know. Quiet or loud, it’s either good or bad.’ He changed the grounds in the coffee maker, and started filling a pot. ‘You a cop?’ he asked.
‘Nope.’
‘Fed?’
‘Nope.’
‘Reporter?’
‘Nope.’
‘Rumpelstiltskin?’
‘Maybe.’
He laughed.
‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said.
‘No shit? You here about the Kore girl?’
‘No, just some boring client stuff. Why, you know her?’
‘Knew her to see around.’ He corrected himself. ‘I
know
her to see around. She seems okay. Runs with a younger crowd, but it’s not like there are so many kids around here that you don’t know everyone by name.’
‘Any idea what might have happened to her?’
‘Nuh-uh. If she was a little older, I’d have said that she might have lit out for the city. Boston or New York, maybe, not Bangor or Portland. They’re no better than here, not really; they’re just bigger. If you’re gonna run, run far, or else this place is going to haul you right back again.’
‘You’re still here.’
‘I’m trying to change the system from within, fighting the good fight, all that kind of bullshit.’
‘If not you, then who?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So you don’t think Anna Kore ran away?’
‘Nope. Not that girls her age don’t run away, but she doesn’t seem like the sort. Everyone says she was okay.’
‘That doesn’t sound good for her.’
‘No, I guess not.’
He went silent. Susanna Wallumrød was singing about her few little love affairs. She sounded weary of them all.
‘Did she have a boyfriend?’
‘I thought you said that you weren’t here about her.’
‘I’m not. I’m just professionally curious.’
He folded his arms and sized me up.
‘Chief Allan said I was to tell him if anyone came asking about her.’
‘I’m sure he did. I figure I’ll be talking to him soon enough. So: Did she have a boyfriend?’
‘No. Her mom was – is – pretty protective of her, or that’s what I heard. Anna was kept on a tight chain, you know, having a single mom and all. She probably would have eased up on her eventually.’
‘Yeah. Well, with luck she’ll still get that chance.’
‘Amen to that.’
He turned his back and started rearranging the last of the pastries. I continued eating, and watched the folk of Pastor’s Bay go about their business. Although school was done for the day, I saw no young people on the streets.
‘Thanks for the sandwich,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you around.’
‘Sure. You have a good day now.’
I drove toward the bridge, the sun now long past its zenith. I thought about Selina Day, and Lonny Midas. I wondered where Lonny was now. Haight had told me that Lonny’s parents died while he was locked up, but there was still his older brother, Jerry, to consider. Maybe Lonny had been in touch with him since his release, but if so, then what of it? What could Lonny Midas tell me that Haight couldn’t? Then again, I was assuming that Haight was the only one whose secret had been discovered. If the information had come from someone involved with the two men during the period of their preparation for release, then Midas might have been targeted too.
But I was also aware of something else that Haight had revealed: his belief that, had he been older, Lonny Midas might have been willing to kill him to ensure that he remained silent about what they had done. Could Lonny Midas have borne a grudge against Haight throughout the period of their incarceration and, upon his release, set out to find him and undermine his new existence? Could Lonny Midas even have abducted Anna Kore to further that aim? They were big jumps to make: too big. They were symptoms of my frustration, and part of me wanted to walk away and let Randall Haight sink or swim depending on how the situation developed. What kept me from dropping the case back into Aimee Price’s lap was the slim possibility that Anna Kore’s disappearance was somehow linked to Haight’s past, but so far I could discern no direct connection between them.
The bridge came into view, the slowly rotting pilings of its predecessor beside it like a shadow given substance. I was halfway across when the black-and-white Explorer emerged from a copse of trees on the far side of the water, lights flashing, and blocked the road. I had been expecting to see it ever since the kid at the coffee shop mentioned the chief of police’s edict. It was my own fault for overstepping the line.
I kept going until I cleared the bridge, then pulled over and placed my hands on the steering wheel. A man in his late thirties, shorter than I was but with the build of a swimmer or a rower, climbed out of the driver’s side of the Explorer, his hand on his weapon and the body of the vehicle between us. His hair was black, and he wore a mustache. Chief Allan looked older in person than he did on TV, and the mustache didn’t do him any favors. He approached me slowly. I waited until he was close enough to see my entire body, then carefully shifted my left hand to roll down the window.
‘License and registration, please,’ he said.
His hand hadn’t shifted from the butt of his gun. He didn’t seem nervous, but you never could tell with small-town cops.
I handed over the documents. He glanced at them, but didn’t call them in.
‘What’s your business here, Mr. Parker?’
‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said.
I caught the flash of recognition in his eyes. Maine is a big state geographically but a small one socially, and I’d made enough noise to be on the radar of most of the law enforcement community, even peripherally.
‘Who’s your client?’
‘I’m working on behalf of a lawyer, Aimee Price. Any questions will have to be directed to her.’
‘How long have you been in town?’
‘A few hours.’
‘You should have reported in to us.’
‘I didn’t realize I had that obligation.’
‘You might have considered it a courtesy call under the circumstances. You know where the police department is?’
‘Yeah, it’s where everything else is. Left at sanitation, right at the clerk’s office, then straight on till morning.’
‘It’s right at sanitation, but close enough. I want you to haul on back there and wait for me.’
‘Can I ask why?’
‘You can ask, but the only answer you’ll get is that I’m telling you to go. The next step is for me to put you in the back of my vehicle and drive you there myself.’
‘I’ll bet your cuffs bite.’
‘Rusty too. Could take a while to get them off.’
‘In that case, I’ll be heading back to town in my car.’
‘I’ll be right behind you.’
‘That’s very reassuring.’
He waited for me to make a turnaround, and it was only when I was safely back on the bridge that he got into the Explorer. He stayed close behind me all the way, although he was kind enough to kill his lights. The kid with the tattoos was standing at the door of the coffee shop when I pulled into the municipal lot. I gave him a wave and he shrugged. No hard feelings, I thought. You did the right thing.
The chief pulled in beside me. I got out and waited for him to join me. He indicated that I should head inside. There was a sprightly looking woman in her early sixties behind a desk just inside the door, surrounded by neatly piled files, a pair of computers, and a dispatcher’s radio. She smiled politely as I entered, and offered me a cookie from a plate on the desk. It seemed rude to refuse, so I took one.
‘You carrying?’ asked Allan.
‘Left-hand side,’ I said.
‘Take it off, and leave it with Mrs. Shaye.’
I kept the cookie between my teeth, removed my jacket, and handed over the shoulder rig.
‘Thank you,’ said Mrs. Shaye. She wrapped the straps around the holster and placed it in a cardboard box, to which she appended a playing card: the nine of clubs. She handed another nine of clubs to me.
‘Don’t lose it, now,’ she said.
‘Likewise,’ I said.
‘Take another cookie,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’
‘In case of what?’ I said, but she didn’t get a chance to answer. Instead, Allan pointed to the left, although his office was to the right. He walked me to one of the town meeting rooms, one so small that I made it look crowded all by myself.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Mrs. Shaye to bring you coffee.’
He closed the door behind him, then locked it as well. I took a seat, finished my first cookie, and put the other one on the table. There was a window that faced onto the rear lot, and I watched a man in overalls working on a second police-department vehicle, a Crown Vic that had clearly been purchased used from another department, with marks on its door where the decal had been removed. Hard times in the city, hard times by the sea.
Mrs. Shaye arrived with coffee and sugar and another cookie, even though I had yet to eat the second one. A long hour went by.
And the sun set on Pastor’s Bay.
Randall Haight sat at his kitchen table, his hands palm down on the cheap wood, staring at his reflection in the window. He did not know the man before him. He did not know Randall Haight, for there was nothing about him to be known. He did not know William Lagenheimer, for William had been erased from existence. The face in the glass represented an Other, a pale thing marooned in darkness, and an Otherness, a realm of existence occupied by unbound souls. The setting sun burned fires in the sky around his visage. His diary lay before him, the pages filled with tiny, almost indecipherable handwriting. He had begun writing down his thoughts shortly after his release. He had found that it was the only way to keep himself sane, to hold his selves separate. He kept the diary hidden in a panel at the base of his bedroom closet. He had learned in prison the importance of hiding places.
There were locks on the windows and locks on the doors. He would usually have started cooking his evening meal by now, but he had no appetite. All of his pleasures had dissipated since the images started to arrive, and the latest batch had turned his stomach. What kind of person would do that to a child? He was grateful to the detective for taking them away with him. He did not want them in his house. The girl might get the wrong idea about him, and he did not want that to happen. The balance between them was precarious enough as things stood.
Randall now understood why the detective had reacted so strongly to him back at the lawyer’s office. Randall hadn’t liked the sense of revulsion that came off the detective at that first meeting, the way he didn’t seem particularly sympathetic to the threat that the messages posed to Randall’s peace of mind, to his life in Pastor’s Bay. It had led him to search for more information about the detective, and what was revealed was both interesting and, Randall supposed, moving. The detective had lost a child to a killer, but here he was working on behalf of another man who had killed a child. Randall struggled to put himself in the detective’s position. Why would he take on such a task? Duty? But he had no duty to Randall, not even to the lawyer. Curiosity? A desire to right wrongs? Justice?
It came to Randall: Anna Kore.
A chicken breast sat defrosting on a plate by the sink. Regardless of his absence of appetite, he had to eat. He would get weak and sick otherwise, and he needed his strength. More than that, he had to be able to keep a clear head. His very existence was under threat. His secrets were at risk of being discovered.
All of his secrets.
The TV was playing in the living room behind him. Cartoons, always cartoons. They were the only programs that seemed to keep her calm. He heard a sound behind him, but he did not turn.
‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Go back to your shows.’
And the girl did as she was told.
12
S
ometimes good things happen to those who wait. This wasn’t one of those times.