Nocturnes

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked. Matheson looked like he could still handle himself.

  “I’m not that kind of man,” he replied, but there was an unspoken “and” hanging in the air.

  I waited. It came.

  “He didn’t look like much: thin, dirty, unhealthy, but I got the feeling that he was stronger than he looked. I think that if I’d tried to lay a hand on him he would have hurt me. Not badly, maybe, but he would have enjoyed humiliating me. There was a malice to him, y’know? This all probably sounds cockeyed to you, but once my anger started to die down I began to get worried. Scared, even.”

  I told him it didn’t sound cockeyed at all, that I had met men like that. They wanted you to descend to their level, and once you were down there they would try to finish you. If you were going to take them on, then you had to be prepared to endure some pain, and to inflict it back in spades.

  Matheson continued: “So I told him that even if what he said was true, he should call up the Farmers’ Mutual Bank and ask them about it. Payments owing to him from John Grady were no business of mine. He didn’t seem to agree.

  ‘I am a collector, Mr. Matheson. I collect debts, but I also have an interest in other items. In lieu of the debt left outstanding by the previous owner, I will accept some small item of furniture from the house. It will barely cover my expenses, but in this case a token gesture will be sufficient. The house contains a number of ornate mirrors. If you give one of them to me, I will consider you to have discharged any responsibilities you may have in this matter.’

  “That was exactly how he spoke,” said Matheson. “He spoke like a damn lawyer. Well, I’d had enough of him by then, so I told him to get the hell out of my office or I’d call the cops. He had any more questions, he could discuss them with my legal people, or with the Farmers’ Mutual, but I didn’t want to see him again.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t move. He just looked at his fingernails for a while before he stood, said that he was sorry I felt that way, and told me that he would deal with the matter through ‘other channels.’ Then he left.”

  “Did you get a look at his car?”

  “There wasn’t one. He left on foot.”

  “And he gave you no contact name, no number?”

  “Nothing. He just told me he was a collector.”

  “Did you talk to the police about this?”

  “I told Chief Grass in Two Mile, but he said there were probably a whole lot of debts left unpaid when John Grady died. He took down the description I gave him, but he said there wasn’t much that he could do unless the collector came back, or used threats.”

  “Did you feel as if he was threatening you in your office? He did speak of going through ‘other channels’ for his payment.”

  “I suppose it could have been a threat. I didn’t take it that way.”

  “And he never mentioned what the debt was, or whom he was representing?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think this man might be the one responsible for placing the photograph in the mailbox?”

  “It’s possible, but I can’t see why he would do it. He certainly didn’t mention anything to do with pictures.”

  Matheson asked if I wanted another coffee. I said yes, if only to give me a little time to think. His story about the collector made me uneasy, and I didn’t particularly want to sit in my car watching an old house night after night, waiting for some lowlife in old clothes who got kicks from planting the pictures of children in a dead child murderer’s mailbox, but something about that photograph of the girl was drawing me in. I had this much in common with Matheson: both of us had lost a daughter, and neither of us was prepared to stand idly by if another child was potentially in danger. Looking back, I guess I knew I would take the case as soon as he showed me the picture of the little girl with the bat in her hands.

  When he came back, I told him my rates. He offered to pay me in advance, but I explained that I’d bill him after the first week. If I was making no progress after two weeks, then I’d have to leave it to the cops. Matheson agreed and prepared to depart. He left the photograph of the unknown girl with me.

  “I made lots of copies,” he said. “If you hadn’t agreed to do this, I was going to post them in stores, on telephone poles, anywhere they might be seen.”

  “How many copies did you make?” I asked.

  “Two thousand,” he replied. “They’re in the trunk of my car. You want some?”

  I took one hundred of them, and left him with the rest.

  I just hoped that we wouldn’t have cause to use them.

  III

  The house was silent and dark when I returned home. Rachel was attending a meeting of the Friends of the Scarborough Public Library, and I didn’t expect her back until later. I stood at the door for a moment and looked out upon the marshes. The great migratory exodus was almost complete, and the quiet of the grasses was now relatively undisturbed for much of the day. The sounds of the birds that remained with us stood out more clearly than before as a consequence, and in recent days I thought I had heard grackles and cowbirds and goldfinches. I wondered if there was an added lightness to their calls now, triggered by an awareness that the population of raptors was now depleted, as some of the hawks and harriers would inevitably have followed their prey south. Then again, the hunters that had stayed would now be competing for a more limited food supply. When the snows came, hunger would start to gnaw at them.

  The move here, following the sale of my grandfather’s old house a few miles away, was a good one, tarnished only by an incident earlier in the year that had led to the drowning of a man out on the marshes. Rachel didn’t like to talk about it, and I didn’t push her on the subject. I wanted very badly for us to be happy here. Perhaps, after all that had gone before, I wanted that happiness too much.

  As I opened the door, Walter, our Lab retriever, emerged guiltily from my little office, where I was pretty certain he’d been curled up on the couch, then tried to divert my attention by covering me with dog spit. I briefly considered shouting at him for putting hairs on my favorite resting place, then realized from his slightly shameful posture that he already knew he wasn’t supposed to be on it and that, frankly, we both understood that if he hadn’t been deep in dog sleep when I arrived he would have been smart enough to make a dash for his basket before I even managed to get my key in the lock. Instead, I contented myself with letting him out into the yard, then closing the door behind him while I made a sandwich from cold cuts.

  I put A History of Sport Fishing, the album I’d bought by Thee More Shallows, on the CD player in the kitchen before sitting down at the table to eat, until the sound of Walter’s paw plaintively scratching at the glass caused me to relent and head out onto the porch instead. Walter had me down pat. He knew I couldn’t stay mad at him for long. Pretty soon, he’d be throwing sticks and I’d be running to fetch them. I fed him about a quarter of my sandwich, even as I recalled Rachel reading me an article about dog training that said that you shouldn’t feed your dog scraps from the table, or allow him to jump up and lick you, because that made him believe he was the alpha male.

  “Walter doesn’t think he’s the alpha male,” I protested at the time, sort of lamely now that I come to think of it. I looked to Walter for confirmation, which probably wasn’t the smartest move on my part if I was trying to claim superiority. Walter, hearing his name, was looking back and forth between us, as if trying to figure out which one of us was going to relent first and just hand over a set of keys and the deed to the house.

  “Hah!” was Rachel’s response. She has a way of saying “Hah!” that pretty much skewers any possible dissent, like a skeptical python that’s just been told to cough up the rabbit and send it merrily on its way.

  Rachel had patted her bump and said, “I hope you’re listening to this. That’s your daddy talking. He thinks he’s the alpha male, but just shoot goo-goo eyes at him and he’ll buy you a car.”

>   “I didn’t buy you a car,” I pointed out, “and you shot goo-goo eyes at me all the time.”

  “I didn’t want a car,” she said. “I have a car.”

  “So why did you shoot goo-goo eyes at me?”

  “Because I wanted something else.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I wanted you.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “You know,” I said, “that would be really cute if it wasn’t kind of sinister.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “It would, wouldn’t it?”

  I glanced at my watch. Rachel would be back soon. The house always felt very empty when she wasn’t around. In the background, a track from the album faded out, the singer repeating over and over something about the people we choose to leave being the ones whom we see all the time, all the time. I fed Walter my last piece of sandwich.

  “Just don’t let Rachel know I did that,” I told him. “Please.”

  The Grady house was quiet. A breeze stirred the trees, and disturbed the pile of dry leaves beneath which the dead wren rested. Matheson stood at the bottom of the steps leading up to the porch, and shined his flashlight upon the house. He checked the locks on the doors, and the wood that covered the windows. There was a SIG Compact in a holster on his belt. He had begun carrying it shortly after the man he now thought of as The Collector came to his office and demanded payment of an old debt.

  The sound of approaching footsteps came to him, but he did not turn around. The beam of a second flashlight joined his own.

  “Everything okay?” asked the patrol cop. He had seen Matheson pull up at the Grady house, and had offered to accompany him up the dark road. Matheson had been grateful for the offer.

  “I think so,” said Matheson.

  “It’s getting colder.”

  “Yes. Snow is coming.”

  “It’ll make it easier to tell if anyone’s been snooping around here.”

  Matheson nodded, then turned to go. The cop followed him, then stopped short. He turned his flashlight upon the woods.

  “What is it?” asked Matheson.

  “I don’t know.”

  He inched forward, his hand already drawing his gun. Matheson added his own light to the cop’s, and together they scanned the trees. Suddenly there was the sound of movement in the undergrowth, and a gray shape with red underparts darted through the low greenery before disappearing into the shadows.

  Both men let out a long, relieved breath.

  “Fox,” said the cop. “That wasn’t good for my nerves.”

  He replaced his pistol and headed back to his car. Matheson remained staring into the woods for a moment more, then followed him. They made their farewells, and both cars drove away.

  There was silence for a time before the figure of a man detached itself from a bank of pines in the darkest reaches of the woods and approached the Grady house. He stood at the very edge of the tree line, then began circling the building, never once straying from the safety of the woods, as though the ground beyond them was somehow unsafe to tread upon. He made one full circuit of the property, then a second, slower this time, seemingly searching for something that had been lost. Eventually, he stopped as he faced the eastern side of the house. He knelt, and, using a pocketknife, commenced digging beneath a small cairn of pebbles that lay almost hidden by grass at the verge of the yard. After he had dug about six inches into the earth, a pale totem was revealed: the skull of a dog. Symbols and lettering had been carved into the bone.

  The man sat back on his haunches, but he did not touch the skull. Instead, he let out a suppressed hiss of anger and disgust. Carefully, making sure that his hands did not come into contact with the dog’s remains, he replaced the earth upon it, then folded the knife and put it back in his pocket. In total, The Collector had counted eight such cairns, each representing a compass point.

  It was as he had suspected: the house was impregnable.

  He retreated into the forest, and then was gone.

  Later that night, I watched from our bed as Rachel undressed in the moonlight. She eased the straps of her slip over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, turning first to one side, then the other. The moonlight touched the swelling of her belly and cast the shadow of her breasts upon the wall.

  “I’m big,” she said.

  “Bigger.”

  I ducked my head just in time to avoid being hit by a shoe.

  “I look like a whale.”

  “Whales are lovable. Everybody loves whales, except the Japanese and the Norwegians, and I’m neither. Come to bed.”

  She finished undressing and slipped under the covers, then lay awkwardly on her side, looking at me.

  “Did you meet your client?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you take the job?”

  “Yep.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not tonight. It’s nothing bad, so don’t start worrying. It’ll keep until the morning.”

  Rachel grinned.

  “So whatcha wanna do now?” she said.

  She leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. Softly, I kissed her back.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I can’t get pregnant.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’ll even let you be the alpha male.”

  “I am the alpha male.”

  Her hand moved slowly down my chest and on to my stomach.

  “Of course you are, darling,” she whispered. “Of course you are…”

  IV

  The town of Two Mile Lake lay in the middle of hard-scrabble land, three miles northeast of the towns of Bingham and Moscow. Here the Kennebec River fed into Wyman Lake before proceeding on its way toward the coast, enlarged further by countless small streams and tributaries. This area was part of the “Bingham Purchase,” named after a Philadelphia landowner named William Bingham who owned so much of the state at the end of the eighteenth century as to be able to bequeath his heirs sufficient to cover half of Massachusetts. There was even a territory dam named after him on the Kennebec, which put him right up there with Hoover.

  North of Two Mile Lake, up by the confluence of the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, lay The Forks, one of those strange Maine places where the past and the present appeared to have reached an uneasy accommodation. The Forks was still technically a plantation—in Maine terms, an unorganized township—and had once been the center of a resort area in the nineteenth century. Now rafters came here, attracted by the effect of the Harris Hydroelectric Station on the water flow. New inns and stores stood alongside the old Marshall Hotel, with its neon COCKTAILS sign, and the stuffed animals in Berry’s General Store. From The Forks, 201 headed north to Canada along the Arnold Trail, striking out into the wilderness just like old Benedict himself did on his way to Quebec at the end of the eighteenth century, with Jackman as the only decent-sized stop along the way.

  Two Mile Lake must have envied some of the comparative prosperity enjoyed by its northern neighbor. It wasn’t entirely clear how the town had come by its name, as there was no body of water worthy of the name closer than Wyman Lake. Two Mile had a kind of standing pond on the northern edge of town, and if you were particularly foolhardy you might take a chance on swimming in it, or eating something that came out of it, but it was no more than a couple of hundred feet at its widest point. Instead, the only conclusion that anyone could reach about the town’s name was that if you headed north from it, then you’d head right back south again after two miles, because there was nothing there to see. In essence, Two Mile Lake was two miles away from nowhere.

  I followed 16 through Kingsbury and Mayfield Corner, then headed up Dead Water Road a ways until I reached the town’s southern limits. I kept my foot to the pedal and pretty soon I was at the town’s northern limits. In between I passed a couple of stores, a school, a pair of churches, a police station, and the remains of a dead dog. I wasn’t sure what had killed the dog, but
boredom seemed like a good guess.

  I parked beside the gray municipal building and headed inside. The local cops shared the premises with the town council, a fire truck, a garbage truck, and what looked like a charity store, its windows grimly festooned with old men’s suits and old women’s bingo dresses. At the little office inside the door I gave my name to the elderly secretary, who looked old enough to remember William Bingham in pantaloons. Then I gave it to her again, as she’d managed to forget it somewhere between hearing it and looking for a pen with which to write it down. Behind her, an overweight woman with frizzy black hair typed slowly on a computer, the expression on her face suggesting that someone had forced her, on pain of death, to suck repeatedly on a sour lemon. They seemed like the kind of women who considered it their sacred duty to be unhappy and regarded anyone with a smile on his face as mired in unimaginable vice. I smiled, and tried to give the impression that I only engaged in imaginable vices. In return, the secretary directed me to an uncomfortable plastic chair. When I sat on it, it teetered to the left, forcing me to shift my weight to the right or tumble straight back out the door.

  After a couple of minutes, a man appeared in the doorway of the room to my left. He wore a brown uniform shirt and neatly pressed brown trousers. According to the badge at his breast, his name was Grass. The local stoners probably laughed themselves blue in the face, at least until Grass got up close and personal with them. He was a big man in his fifties, and he still looked fit. There was no paunch, and when he shook my hand I felt one of my knuckles pop. His face was deeply tanned, making his gray mustache and hair seem all the more startling. He should have lost the mustache, I thought: without it, and wearing a hat, he could have passed for early forties.