‘How you doing?’ he said. ‘Mind if I ask what you’re at?’
‘Mr. Carroll?’ I said, trying to buy myself some more time as I continued to probe at the dirt. There was rain dripping down my back, and my clothes were already pasted to my skin, but I wasn’t about to stop, not unless someone forced me.
‘That’s right.’
‘I think I met your wife.’
‘I think you did. She said you were a detective, and you told her something about wanting to test the ground.’
‘That’s right. I—’
The rod struck something hard. I pulled it out, shifted position, and inserted it again.
‘Do you have another of these rods in the back of your truck?’ I asked. The wind must have been gusting at forty miles an hour, and I was starting to shiver. The big nor’easter that had been forecast might ultimately present as snow on the mountains, and when the weaker trees fell they would bring power lines down with them, but here it was falling as icy water. Tonight the cops would be tied up with accidents and power failures. In a way, it was all to the good if I was right about what I believed was buried beneath my feet.
‘What have you found?’ asked Carroll.
‘Broken cinder blocks.’
‘Why would somebody bury cinder blocks?’
He was beside me now, his shoulders hunched against the rain. I pulled out the rod and moved it a foot to the right. This time it encountered no obstacle. I moved it two feet to the left. It went in eighteen inches before hitting stone.
‘To keep something from being dug up by animals,’ I said. ‘You remember Mrs. Lagenheimer? Your wife knew her as Beth.’
‘Yeah, the woman who used to live here with her son. She moved out years ago.’
I leaned on the rod. My back ached from pushing, and my hands were raw.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think she ever left.’
It didn’t take us long, working together and using the rest of the rods from Carroll’s truck, to mark out the boundaries of what I believed was a grave. The rough rectangle was six feet in length and about two in width. When we were done, I gave Carroll one of my cards and told him that I’d be back as soon as I could.
‘Shouldn’t we call the cops?’ he said.
‘They’re not going to come out tonight,’ I said, ‘not in weather like this. Even if they do, they won’t be able to make a start on a dig until it gets light again. And, you know, it may just be a pile of broken blocks.’
‘Yeah.’ Carroll didn’t sound as if he believed that was the case. I could barely hear him above the sound of the wind and the beating of the rain.
‘Look, I’ll call them from the road, okay?’ I said in an effort to mollify him. He was a big man, and I didn’t want him to try to stop me leaving. He wouldn’t succeed, but if things got physical one or both of us would get hurt.
‘I don’t get why you can’t just call them now,’ said Carroll. ‘And maybe you should stick around, you know? Doesn’t seem proper for you to just leave if you’re right about there being a body buried here.’
Bodies, I thought, but I didn’t say that.
‘You have my card,’ I said. ‘Whoever, or whatever, is down there isn’t going anywhere.’ Then I told him the truth, or something of it. ‘And I think I know who did this, and I want to see his face when I tell him I’ve been here.’
Carroll searched for the lie, the rain streaming from our faces, and didn’t find it.
‘I don’t hear from them in an hour, then I’ll call them myself,’ he said.
I thanked him. At his invitation, I followed him back to his house in my car and he gave me a towel with which to dry myself, and a flask of coffee to warm me on the journey. I called Randall Haight from the road. He answered on the second ring.
‘Mr. Haight, it’s Charlie Parker.’
He didn’t sound happy to hear from me. I didn’t care.
‘What’s this about, Mr. Parker? You’re no longer working on my behalf.’
‘Tommy Morris,’ I lied. ‘We think he’s going to make his move soon.’
‘Am I in danger?’
‘I don’t know, but I’d like to get you out of there. I want you to pack some clothes, then sit tight until I get to you, okay?’
‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said, the fact that he had fired me now conveniently set aside. ‘How long will it take?’
He was scared, and he wasn’t pretending.
‘Not long,’ I said. ‘Not long at all.’
You have to be careful what lies you tell. You have to be careful in case your lies are heard, and the gods of the underworld mock you by turning them to truths.
34
I
was half an hour from Pastor’s Bay when Angel called.
‘Allan is on the move again.’
‘Going home?’
‘Kinda. He came part of the way, then stopped at a gas station and made a call. Now he’s sitting in his truck smoking a cigarette, and not in a relaxed way. He’s making me nervous, he’s wound so tight. Why does someone with a cell use a pay phone?’
‘Because he doesn’t want anyone to have a record of the call.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Keep a note of the time of the call, but stay with him.’
‘You sure? What about Haight?’
‘He’s not going to run out before I get there. He thinks I’m coming to protect him.’
‘And you aren’t?’
‘I just want to talk to him. I’ll do it at gunpoint if I have to, but it may not come to that.’
I was close now, and I was starting to understand something of the nature of the man who called himself Randall Haight. I believed that Marybeth Lagenheimer, Randall Haight’s mother, was buried on her property near Gorham, New Hampshire. What I didn’t know was if she was alone down there, but I was guessing that she had some company in the grave. The man who occupied the neat, anonymous house with the ugly paintings on the wall had put her there. He had graduated from the killing of a child to the murder of an adult. He had piled lie upon lie, identity upon identity, creating a series of new selves without cracking or revealing the truth about his imposture, and only the intervention of an outside force, an anonymous tormentor, had finally threatened his existence. He was a killer who had taken the lives of at least two people, their deaths separated by decades but connected by the blood that flowed from the first killing to the next.
Yet Randall Haight, or the man who claimed to be Randall Haight, still had an alibi for the time of Anna Kore’s disappearance courtesy of Chief Kurt Allan, who was himself apparently a predatory male with a taste for younger women. If they were working together, it made sense for Allan to have provided Haight with an alibi. If they weren’t, I had simply exchanged the mystery of Anna Kore’s fate, for which I didn’t have an answer, for another mystery, one for which I thought I did have a solution.
The road was dark and empty as I drove. Rain had fallen here too, but the storm from the north had been at its strongest over New Hampshire and large parts of Vermont. Coastal Maine, by comparison, had barely been touched. Lights burned in Pastor’s Bay, and through the window of the police department I could see figures moving. The State Police Winnebago was still in the lot, but its windows were dark. There was no sign of the big SUVs beloved of Engel and his agents.
Randall Haight had drawn the drapes at his living-room window, but a sliver of light was visible through the gap. I peered in and saw him sitting at the kitchen table with his back to me. Three cardboard storage boxes were piled one on top of another on the floor beside him.
I rang the front doorbell. My gun was by my side, but I kept my body turned from the door so that it was not visible.
‘Who is it?’ said Haight. ‘Who’s there?’
He was calling from inside the living room. I could hear the fear in his voice. I wondered if he had a gun.
‘It’s Charlie Parker, Mr. Haight.’
Footsteps approached the door, and I heard the security chain being removed. When he opened the door his hands were empty, and there were two suitcases in the hallway.
‘I see you’re planning a trip,’ I said.
‘Even before you called, I felt that it would be safer for me if I left town for a while. I planned to inform the police tomorrow morning. I’ve made a reservation at a hotel at Bar Harbor. I printed off a copy of the reservation confirmation for the authorities.’
He saw the gun in my hand.
‘Am I in danger, Mr. Parker?’
‘No, Lonny.’ I raised the gun and pointed it at him. ‘But am I?’
Lonny Midas didn’t react. He didn’t become fearful or angry. He merely looked confused. In truth, I don’t think even he knew who he was anymore, not for sure.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we have much time.’
He backed up. I entered the house and pushed the door closed behind me.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘It’s a sign. Your coming here, it’s a sign. Soon the others will come too, and then it will all be over. It’s already started.’
‘What others, Lonny?’
He just shook his head. His eyes were glassy, and his smile was that of a man who has glimpsed the guillotine from the window of his cell and feels the first touch of the madness that will cloud his fear and make the end easier to bear. He retreated into the living room, his hands held away from his sides, the palms upturned. His shirt was clean and neatly pressed, his tie a pale pink. I could see that he was not armed, but I put him against the wall and frisked him anyway, just to be sure. He did not object. He said only ‘Have you seen her?’
‘Who? Anna Kore?’
I stepped away from him and he turned slowly around.
‘She likes you,’ he went on, as though I had not spoken. ‘I knew it from the first time you came here. Then she came to me one last time and I thought that I understood. Did she go to you? Is that why she left me?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lonny.’
‘I think you do. Not Anna. It was never about Anna. I’m talking about Selina Day. Will you tell her that I’m sorry?’
‘I think you need to sit down, ’ I said, and he understood that he would receive no confirmation of his beliefs or his fears from me.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell her myself, when she comes.’
He thought that he had always intended to kill William Lagenheimer. He’d given himself other reasons for finding him, but secretly he knew how any meeting between them would conclude. It had all been William’s fault: the years in jail, the pain inflicted upon him by others, the haunting by Selina Day that would, in time, become something else, something more complex and ineffable, although that would only be revealed to others later upon the discovery of his diary. All of it was William’s fault because he was weak and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. They had been friends, William and Lonny, and friends were supposed to look out for each other. Friends didn’t tell. They kept their secrets. He’d warned William about that, just before they closed in on Selina Day and began putting their hands on her body.
‘You mustn’t tell, William. Whatever happens, you mustn’t tell.’ Sometimes he would annoy William by calling him Billy, but not this time. It was too serious for that. They were about to do something Very Bad.
‘I won’t tell,’ said William, and Lonny had wanted to believe him. He had wanted to believe him so badly that he swallowed his doubts and ignored the way William’s eyes couldn’t quite meet his. His mouth was dry and the blood was pounding in his head. He could almost feel the girl beneath him, the warmth of her, the smell of her. He needed William there to help him, to make it happen.
They’d both wanted to do it. Of course, that wasn’t the way William told it once they’d made him cry by telling him that they’d lock him away from his mommy for years and years, lock him away and put him in with the big men, and you didn’t want to know what the big men would do to you.
Remember what you wanted to do to Selina Day, Billy? Well, they’ll do that to you, except it’ll hurt more. They’ll do it over and over until the pain gets so bad that you’ll want to die. You’ll call for your mommy, but she won’t be there to help you. Right now, we’re the only ones who can help you, Billy, so you’d better start telling us the truth, because not far from here your friend Lonny is being offered the same deal, and the first one who comes clean wins the teddy bear. He gets looked after, and there’ll be doctors who will try to help him be a better person, and the big men won’t get to lay their hands on him. The other one, the one who doesn’t talk in time, he’ll get thrown to the wolves. That’s the deal. That’s the way these things work. So you’d better start talking before your friend does.
Except Lonny wouldn’t talk. Lonny would never tell. He kept his arms folded and he didn’t cry, not even when one of the policemen hit him so hard across the back of the head that his vision went funny and he bit the inside of his cheek and had to spit the blood from his mouth. Every time they asked him why he’d killed the girl he just shook his head, and the only words he spoke were to tell them that he hadn’t done anything at all, that he didn’t know what they were talking about. And even as he spoke he knew they were asking William the same questions in another room, and he prayed and prayed that William would be strong just this once, that he’d remain true to his promise and keep their secret. He refused to countenance any other possibility, as though by sheer force of will he could hold William together just as he was holding himself together.