The Woman in the Woods

  “So Moxie is employing you to look into this out of the goodness of his heart?” said Walsh.

  “Something like that.”

  “We don’t even know for sure that the woman was Jewish.”

  “Moxie is under the impression that a Star of David might have been carved nearby at about the same time she went into the ground.”

  “Moxie knows a lot more about this case than he should. Those details haven’t been released yet.”

  “Moxie has his ways.”

  “If I find out who’s been leaking to him, I’ll have them trawling truck-stop washrooms for drunks and perverts.”

  “At least they’ll have Moxie to defend them. And this isn’t a murder investigation yet, is it?”

  “The woman didn’t bury herself.”

  “That’s true of most dead people. When do you go public with what you have?”

  “When we’re dealing in facts, not speculation. You might explain the distinction to Moxie, next time he decides to throw his weight around.”

  Parker leaned back from the table. Lightning flashed over the ferry terminal across the street. He waited for the sound of thunder, but none came. He knew it was out there nonetheless, but too remote to hear, like a conversation in a distant room. He associated such storms with summer, not the start of spring. The strangeness of the weather was unsettling.

  “Why are you so sore?” he asked.

  “Because no good ever comes of you involving yourself in an investigation,” said Walsh. “Because I think you were close enough to Billy Ocean’s truck when it blew that your eyebrows got singed. Because I believe you colluded in drawing a man to his death on a beach in Boreas. Take your pick. You don’t like any of those reasons, I got plenty more.”

  “This isn’t about your problems with me. It’s about a buried woman and a missing child.”

  “Don’t get self-righteous. I know exactly what this is about.”

  “Then what harm can come from sharing information?”

  “Because you don’t share, you just take. You’ve hidden so much over the years, you should own a vault.”

  “I’m trying to be straight with you now.”

  “Straight like a snake.”

  “That’s just hurtful.”

  “You’re like a stone in my shoe, but no matter how hard I shake it, I can’t get the damn thing out.”

  “Is that your way of saying you wish you knew how to quit me?”

  Walsh squinted at him.

  “What the fuck is that from?”

  “Brokeback Mountain.”

  “Jesus, just when I think it can’t get any worse.”

  One of the baristas came over to inform them that the coffee shop was closing for the evening.

  “Good,” said Walsh.

  Parker followed Walsh to the door, and walked alongside him until they neared their respective cars, each parked within sight of the other, with Walsh’s closer to Arabica. Another fork of lightning fractured the sky, so bright and sudden that Parker could see Peaks Island silhouetted against it.

  And still the rain fell.

  “It doesn’t feel like a killing,” said Parker. “What kind of killer puts a woman in the ground, then takes the time to carve a marker?”

  “No kind of killer at all.” Walsh got in his car and tried to close the door, but Parker’s body was in the way.

  “I’m good at this,” Parker said. “Throw me a bone.”

  “Goddamn you and Moxie. I swear, the two of you could cover vacations in hell itself.” Parker thought Walsh might be about to cry from frustration, and he didn’t want to make a grown man cry. “Look, Moxie is right: the woman gave birth shortly before she died, the carved star may be contemporaneous, but the anthropological examiner may have picked up something the ME missed.”

  When buried remains were discovered, it was routine to seek advice from the anthropologists at the University of Maine in Orono. They would also be brought in to assist with the search for the infant.

  “Which is?”

  “The anthropologist found damage to the placenta, and was just about able to detect corresponding trauma to what was left of the uterus.”

  “A consequence of the birth, or an inflicted injury?”

  “It’s called placental abruption, but I hadn’t heard of it until yesterday. It means that the placenta partially separated from Jane Doe’s uterus before the birth of her child. It probably happened suddenly, and it caused heavy bleeding. In a hospital situation, she’d have been given an emergency C-section, but she wasn’t in a hospital: she was probably out in the woods, and she may have bled to death because of it.”

  “Which makes it less likely that the child survived.”

  “Not impossible, but cuts the odds in its favor: if it was deprived of oxygen for long enough, it could have been stillborn. We’re going to start digging, see what we can find. Meanwhile, we’re running what we have on the mother through state missing persons, as well as NCIC, NamUs, and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, just in case.”

  The National Crime Information Center’s Missing Person File had been in existence for over forty years, and contained FBI records for individuals reported missing under a variety of categories, but generally comprising those about whose safety there were reasonable concerns. But someone had to be sufficiently worried about a potential absentee to make a report to law enforcement, which didn’t always happen, and there was also no binding requirement on other agencies to forward details of missing adults to the FBI’s national systems, which was why some 40,000 bodies remained unidentified in the United States. NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, was designed to improve access to database information on missing persons, and to address the low rate of case reporting through the NCIC. Meanwhile, DNA samples from Jane Doe and the placental remains found with her would be forwarded to the Biometrics Team at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The team would ensure that the DNA was searched against reference samples in CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, in the hope of a possible match.

  Parker thanked Walsh. He had confirmed what had been offered up by Moxie’s source, and he now knew more about the circumstances of the birth. He might also have convinced Walsh of his bona fides where this case was concerned.

  “I hope Moxie isn’t paying you for progress,” said Walsh. “It’s a Jane Doe in a forest grave. But if you discover anything we can’t, I may find it in my heart to be impressed.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “You know, I never saw Brokeback Mountain.”

  “Gay cowboys.”

  “So I heard. On that subject, you see Angel, you pass on my best wishes.”

  “And Louis?”

  “Tell him to take a Xanax.”

  Walsh drove away. The dark was deepening, and the next flash of lightning arced like fingers of energy over land and sea, as though to pluck ships from the ocean and the living and dead alike from their rest. This time, though, Parker heard it: the rumble of thunder, the approaching storm. He raised his collar against the rain, and willed the squall to seek some more distant landing.

  CHAPTER

  XXVII

  Quayle must have slept, because when he opened his eyes the tones of the room had altered, and the shadows were not as they had been. The Pale Child was standing on the patterned rug by the end of the bed. It was naked and sexless, its chest flat and its head entirely bald, lending it a resemblance to an overgrown, unfinished doll. The Pale Child’s joints were bent backward at the knee, like the hind legs of a horse, and its elbows were bent forward, as though the three points of articulation had once been broken and deliberately reset in a state of dislocation. The nails on its fingers and toes were yellow and twisted, and neither iris nor pupil was visible in the whiteness of its eyes. Instead a hollow remained at the center of each, so that if one were offered an appropriate angle, and a sufficiency of illumination, an examination of the interior of its sku
ll might have been possible.

  Quayle did not stir from his chair. He regarded the Pale Child as one might a moth that had flitted into one’s room: a presence without any intrinsic novelty in and of itself, but a distraction nonetheless. The Pale Child opened and closed its mouth, and its head bobbed in a pecking motion. Now, to Quayle, it seemed more like a featherless bird, a fledgling fallen from its nest and seeking succor from one who had none to offer.

  A soft knocking came on the door connecting Quayle’s room to its neighbor.

  “Come in,” he said.

  The door opened, and Pallida Mors was revealed. Like the Pale Child, Mors was naked, although Mors’s proportions were entirely those of an adult woman. Her body was extraordinarily white, its mortuary expanse broken only by the faint tracery of veins revealed by the lamplight, like distant rivers cutting through snow, and the hairs at her pubis, the mere into which these tributaries might feed. A small circular gouge mark, previously concealed by white makeup, was now visible on her right cheek. The mark was recent, and deep—a souvenir of the failed attempt to dispose of one of Dobey’s waitresses—but did not appear infected.

  Mors could not see the Pale Child—her nature was not like Quayle’s—but she had grown adept at sensing the presence of the chthonic, the seeping of pollutants from one reality into another. She paused on the border between their rooms, as though reluctant to risk an incursion into unknown realms.

  “What is it?” she asked, and Quayle was struck by the coarseness of her voice, a detuned instrument capable only of communicating the mundane and the ugly.

  “A child. Or something like a child.” His eyes flicked to Mors. “But it’s gone now. You must have scared it away.”

  If any insult was intended, Mors chose to ignore it, or perhaps failed to recognize it entirely. Even after all their years together, the workings of her mind were often alien to Quayle. One might as well have tried to understand the thoughts of a spider or a wasp: a predatory, hungry organism.

  “I’ll return to my room, if you’d prefer,” she said.

  “No, you can stay.”

  She walked to his bed, climbed beneath the sheets, and watched as Quayle removed his clothing. His body was without reserves of fat, an assemblage of muscle, sinew, and bone that resembled less a living being than an anatomical illustration, like some creation of Vesalius or Albinus given only the thinnest of epidermal cloaks for concealment.

  He came to her then, and she shivered at his touch, for he was so very cold. When he entered her, it was as though she were being penetrated by a shard of ice; and as she held him to her, she thought that her skin must surely adhere to his, so profound was his algor; and when they separated, sections of her dermal layer would remain fixed to his, leaving her to lie with redness exposed. As he came inside her, she felt his seed spread with an anesthetic chill, proceeding beyond the chasm of her sex into her belly and her chest, her arms and her legs, until finally it found the red glow of her consciousness and dulled it to yellow, then white, then—

  Quayle removed himself from her and reclined against his pillow. Mors was already breathing deeply beside him, although the stink of her exhalations went unnoticed by him; Quayle had long since lost his senses of taste and smell, and ate only for sustenance, not pleasure, just as he took little sexual gratification from any congress with Mors. It was her warmth he desired, her energy in those moments permeating the ice and permafrost of his being to connect with whatever residual heat might yet reside in the tephra of the self. Coldness was the curse for living so long, if such prolonged agony could even be termed a life.

  Quayle turned his head and looked to the corner of the room nearest the window, where the shadows were deepest. From them stepped the Pale Child, which had been present for all that had transpired, sucking in the sight of congress through the recesses of its sockets. It sniffed at the air of the room, and its musky residue of sex.

  “When all is done,” said Quayle, “and this world is altered, you can have her. You and your kind can have them all.”

  CHAPTER

  XXVIII

  The storm swept along the coast during the night, and woke Parker by rattling the slates on his roof and testing the security of his windows and doors, like a formless entity seeking passage to new territories. When he rose the next morning, his yard was littered with broken branches, and an old bird’s nest lay strangely intact on his lawn, but the day was the warmest yet, and only occasional pockets of dirty white remained in the lee of trees. Parker wiped down one of the chairs on his porch, and breakfasted on cereal and coffee with his feet on the rail, the call of birdsong for his listening pleasure.

  He felt the urge to speak with Sam, his daughter, but he knew she would be preparing for school, and he did not wish to interrupt her routine. He and Rachel, Sam’s mother, were now in a state of uneasy truce. Rachel had suspended legal proceedings intended to leave Parker with only supervised access to his child, a consequence of his vocation and the violent proclivities of those with whom he came in contact. The disorder of his own life had bled into his daughter’s existence, to the legitimate concern of her mother, and Rachel had believed herself to be left with no choice but to seek protection for Sam from the courts.

  Then, almost as suddenly as the issue had arisen, it subsided again, with Rachel unwilling to offer any excuse for her change of heart. Parker was content to let sleeping dogs lie. It was enough to enjoy time with Sam without another adult intruding, to be there for her without precondition or regulation when she needed him, even if the depths of his daughter’s nature remained as mysterious to him as the remotest of ocean chasms.

  He sometimes woke to Sam’s voice speaking to him in the night, as clearly as though she were standing beside him in the room. On those occasions he would wonder if, in missing her daily physical presence in his life, he might be creating imaginary discourses in his sleep as recompense for her absence. But sometimes when he was awake he heard her in conversation with another child, their words carried to him as an echo from Vermont, and Parker had no doubts about the identity of the second figure, because he had heard Sam speak her name in the past.

  “Jennifer.”

  Sam and Jennifer: the living daughter speaking to the dead.

  The world could grow no more curious, Parker felt, even as he found solace in the knowledge that in time he would close his eyes in this world and open them in another, and there Jennifer would be waiting for him, and she would lead him to her god.

  It was 7:30 a.m. Parker washed his cup and bowl, got in his car, and drove to St. Maximilian Kolbe, where he arrived just in time for the start of morning mass. He took a seat at the back of the church, where he always felt most comfortable. He was not a regular attendee, but his childhood Catholicism had never left him and he still derived comfort from a place of worship. On this spring morning he allowed the liturgy to wash over him, the familiarity of its calls and responses itself a form of meditation, and he prayed for his children, the living and the dead; for his wife, now gone from him; for Rachel, whom he still loved; and for the anonymous woman in the woods, and the child to whom she had given birth at the end of her life, that, alive or dead, they might both be at peace.

  * * *

  DANIEL WEAVER HEARD THE toy phone ringing just as he was leaving the house. On an ordinary day he would already have been at preschool, but he had a dental appointment on this particular morning and so had been permitted to sleep a little later than usual. His grandfather was waiting for him by the front door, as his mother couldn’t afford to take time off work.

  Daniel had sensed a certain new tension between his mother and grandfather since the latter’s recent return, although he was unable to ascribe any particular cause to it. This fractiousness did not trouble him greatly because his mother and grandfather often needled each other, mostly in an unserious way but occasionally in a more grievous manner that might cause them to be at odds for days on end.

  “Your grandfather is a stubborn
man,” his mother would offer by way of explanation, which Daniel found funny because, with only two words changed, it was exactly what his grandfather said about Daniel’s mother. Daniel loved them both, though a dad would have been nice. “He went away, and then he died,” was all his mother would ever tell Daniel about his father.

  “Did he know about me?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he left before anyone was even aware that you were growing inside me.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was like you.”

  “Is that why you and I look so different?”

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  Now here was Daniel’s grandfather instead, big and strong, with his long, prematurely white hair, tattoos on his arms—pictures and words, Daniel’s name among them—and a piercing in his left ear. He wore faded denim jeans, big steel-toed boots, and a black coat that hung to the middle of his thighs. Nobody else’s grandfather looked like Grandpa Owen. Daniel liked that about him. Grandpa Owen was cooler than any other grandpa, cooler even than most kids’ fathers.

  “You ready to go, scout?” said Grandpa Owen.

  “Yes.”

  “That tooth hurt much?”

  “A bit.”

  “Want me to take it out for you, save you a trip to the sawbones?”

  “No.”

  “You sure? Only requires a piece of string. I tie one end to the tooth, the other to my rig, and—bang!—it’ll all be over before you know it, and without an injection either.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Your choice. I’d do it for ten bucks.”

  “Nope.”

  “How about we split it? Five for you, five for me.”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re no fun. Say, is that a telephone I hear?”

  “It’s a toy one.”

  “Why is it ringing?”

  Daniel shrugged.