The Dark Hollow Police Department lay about half a mile beyond the northern end of the town. It was a single-storey brick building with its own generator in a concrete bunker at its eastern side. The building itself was quite new, a consequence of a fire a couple of years back, which had destroyed the original structure just off the main street.
Inside it was warm and brightly lit, and a sergeant in shirt sleeves stood behind a wooden desk fining in some forms. His shiny name badge said ‘Ressler’, so I figured he was the same Ressler who had watched Emily Watts die. I introduced myself and asked to see the chief.
‘Can I ask what it’s in connection with, sir?’
‘Ellen Cole,’ I replied.
His brow furrowed a little as he picked up the phone and dialled an extension number. ‘There’s a guy here wants to talk to you about Ellen Cole, chief,’ he said, then put his hand over the receiver and turned back to me. ‘What did you say your name was again?’
I gave it to him again and he repeated it into the phone. ‘That’s right, chief. Parker. Charlie Parker.’ He listened for a moment, then looked at me closely, sizing me up. ‘Yeah, that sounds about right. Sure, sure.’ He put the phone down then reappraised me without saying anything.
‘So, does he remember me?’ I asked.
Ressler didn’t reply, but I got the feeling that the sergeant knew his chief well and had detected something in his voice that put him on his guard. ‘Follow me,’ he said, unlocking a dividing door to one side of the desk and holding it to one side to let me pass. I waited while he relocked it, then followed him between a pair of desks and into a small, glass-walled cubicle. Behind a metal desk, on which lay trays of papers and a computer, sat Randall Jennings.
He hadn’t changed too much. True, he was greyer and had put on a little weight, his face now slightly puffy and the beginnings of a double chin hanging down below his jawline, but he was still a good-looking man, with sharp brown eyes and wide, strong shoulders. It must have hurt his ego, I thought, when his wife had commenced an affair with me.
He waited for Ressler to leave and close the door of the office before he spoke. He didn’t ask me to sit down and didn’t seem troubled by the fact that, standing, I could look down on him.
‘I never thought I’d see your face again,’ he said at last.
‘I guessed by the way you said goodbye. I’m surprised you didn’t ask your sergeant to stay in here and guard the door.’
He didn’t respond, just rearranged some papers on his desk. I wasn’t sure if the gesture was meant to distract him, or me. ‘You’re here about Ellen Cole?’
‘That’s right.’
‘We don’t know anything about it. She came, she left.’ He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
‘That’s not what her mother thinks.’
‘I don’t care what her mother thinks. What I’m telling you is what we know, same thing I told her father when he was up here.’
It struck me that I must just have missed Walter Cole, that we might even have been in town at the same time. I felt a twinge of sorrow that he had been forced to come up here alone, fearing for his daughter’s safety. I would have helped him, had I known.
‘The family’s filed a missing person report.’
‘I’m aware of that. I had a federal agent chewing my ear over a non-existent NCIC filing.’ He looked hard at me. ‘I told him it was a long way from New York to Dark Hollow. We do things our own way up here.’
I didn’t respond to his bout of territorial spraying. ‘Are you going to act on the report?’ I persisted.
Jennings stood up, the knuckles of his large hands resting on his desk. I had almost forgotten what a big man he was. There was a gun in a holster at his belt, a Coonan .357 Magnum out of St. Paul, Minnesota. It looked shiny and new. I guessed that Rand Jennings didn’t have much cause to use it way up here, unless he sat on his porch and took potshots at rabbits.
‘Am I having trouble making myself understood?’ he said softly, but with a hint of suppressed anger. ‘We’ve done what we can. We have responded to the missing person report. Our view is that the girl and her boyfriend may have run away together and, so far, we have no reason to suspect otherwise.’
‘The manager of the motel said they were heading north.’
‘Maybe they were.’
‘All that’s north is Baxter and Katahdin. They never made it there.’
‘Then they went someplace else.’
‘There may have been someone else with them.’
‘Maybe there was. All I know is that they left town.’
‘I can see now why you never made detective.’
He flinched, and his face flushed red. ‘You don’t know the first damn thing about me,’ he said. The anger was distinct now as he pronounced his next words slowly and with deliberate emphasis. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have some real crimes to deal with.’
‘Really. Somone stealing Christmas trees? Maybe trying to screw a moose?’
He walked around the side of the desk and came close to me as he passed by to open the door of his office. I think he half expected me to take a step back from him, but I didn’t.
‘I hope you’re not planning on looking for trouble here,’ he said. He could have been talking about Ellen Cole, but his eyes said he was talking about someone else.
‘I don’t have to look for trouble,’ I replied. ‘I stay still long enough, trouble finds me.’
‘That’s because you’re dumb,’ he said, still holding the door open. ‘You don’t pay attention to the lessons life teaches you.’
‘You’d be surprised how much I’ve learned.’
I prepared to leave his office, but his left hand shot out to block me. ‘Remember one thing, Parker: this is my town and you’re a guest. Don’t abuse the privilege.’
‘So it’s not a case of “what’s mine is yours”?’
‘No,’he said, with menace. ‘No, it isn’t.’
I left the building and walked to my car, the wind now howling through the trees and biting at my bare fingers. Above me, the sky was dark. As I reached the Mustang, an old green Datsun Sunny pulled into the lot and Lorna Jennings stepped from the car. She was wearing a black leather jacket with a big fur collar and blue jeans tucked into the same boots she had been wearing the last time we met. She didn’t see me until she had begun to walk towards the main entrance. When she did spot me, she stopped short for a moment before coming over, casting an anxious glance at the illuminated doorway as she did so.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Talking to your husband. He wasn’t very helpful.’
She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Are you surprised?’
‘No, not really, but it’s not about me. A girl and a young man are missing and I think somebody here may know what happened to them. Until I find out who that might be, I’m going to be around for a while.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The daughter of a friend, and the girl’s boyfriend. Her name is Ellen Cole. You ever hear Rand mention her?’
She nodded. ‘He said he’d done what he could. He thinks they may have eloped.’
‘Young love,’ I said. ‘It’s a beautiful thing.’
Lorna swallowed and ran a hand through her hair. ‘He hates you, Bird, for what you did. For what we did.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘Not for him,’ she said. ‘Or me.’
I was sorry I’d mentioned young love. I didn’t like the look in her eyes. It made me nervous. But I surprised myself by asking the next question.
‘Why are you still with him, Lorna?’
‘Because he’s my husband. Because I have nowhere else to go.’
‘That’s not true, Lorna. There’s always somewhere else.’
‘Is that an offer?’
‘Nope, it’s just an observation. You take care.’ I began to walk away, but she reached out and stopped me by placing her hand on my arm.
‘No, you be careful, Bird,’ she said. ‘Like I said, he hasn’t forgiven you, and he won’t.’
‘Has he forgiven you?’ I asked.
There was something in her face as she spoke, something that reminded me of that first afternoon we spent together and the warmth of her skin against mine. ‘I didn’t want his forgiveness,’ she said. Then she smiled sadly and left me.
I spent the next hour wandering around the stores in Dark Hollow, showing Ellen Cole’s photograph to anyone who’d take the time to look. They recalled her at the diner, and in the drugstore, but nobody had seen Ellen and Ricky leave and no one could confirm whether or not they were with another man, or speculate as to who that person might have been. It grew colder and colder as I walked, my coat wrapped tightly around me, the lights of the stores casting a yellow glow on the snow.
When I had exhausted every avenue of inquiry, at least for the present, I went back to my room, showered, and changed into a pair of denims and a shirt and sweater before pulling on my overcoat and preparing to meet Angel and Louis for dinner. Angel was already outside the room, drinking coffee and blowing puffs of white breath into the air like an unhealthy steam engine.
‘You know, it’s warmer out here than it is in that room,’ he said. ‘I lost a layer of skin from my feet, the tiles in the bathroom are so cold.’
‘You’re too sensitive. It must be a gay thing.’
‘Yeah, and I play the violin and write great works of literature while I’m on the can. You know, it’s stereotyping like that that’s stopped gays from . . .’
‘From what? What exactly have you not done that you really, desperately want to do?’
‘Go back to New York?’
‘And being gay is stopping you from doing that?’
‘No, I guess not. You’re stopping me from doing that.’
‘See? So being gay has nothing to do with it. You could be straight and you’d still be stuck up here.’
Angel snorted unhappily and stamped his feet while alternating the coffee cup from hand to hand, each time putting his free hand under the opposite armpit.
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘You’re going to make it rain. Any sign of activity out at Meade Payne’s place?’
He came to a relative standstill. ‘None that we could see without knocking on the door and asking for cookies and a glass of milk. Caught a sight of the young guy and Payne eating supper, but they were alone, far as we could see. You have any luck with Jennings?’
‘No.’
‘You surprised?’
‘Yes and no. He’s got no reason to help me, but this isn’t about me. It’s about Ellen and her boyfriend, but I could see in his eyes that he would use them to get at me, if he could. I don’t understand him. He’s suffered. I know he has. His wife took up with another man behind his back, a man a good ten years younger than him, but he’s still with her, and it’s hell for both of them. It wasn’t as if Rand was old, or cruel, or impotent. He had what it took; or, maybe, he had it according to his own definition of it. I took something away from him, and he won’t ever forgive me for it. But how can he not feel for Ellen Cole, for Ricky, for their families? No matter how much he hates me, they have to matter.’ I kicked idly at the dirt on the ground. ‘Sorry, Angel. I’m thinking out loud.’
Angel tossed the remains of his coffee into a mound of frozen, compacted snow. I could hear the soft hiss as it landed, as the coffee corrupted the whiteness of its crystals one by one.
‘Suffering isn’t enough, Bird,’ said Angel softly. ‘So he’s suffered: big fuckin’ deal. Get in line with the rest of us suckers. It’s not enough to suffer, and you know that. What matters is that you understand that others suffer, and some of them suffer worse than you could ever do. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin’ cross for the world to see. You do it because it’s the right thing to do.
‘From what you say, this Rand Jennings doesn’t have a compassionate bone in his body. All he feels is self-pity, and he doesn’t understand any suffering but his own. I mean, look at his marriage. There are two of them in it, Bird; whatever you may have felt for her, she’s stayed with him this long and if you hadn’t turned up like a fire in February then everything would be just the way it was. He’d be unhappy and she’d be unhappy and they’d be unhappy together, and it seems like they’ve set their own boundaries on what is and is not going to happen to change that situation.
‘But he’s selfish, Bird. He only thinks of his own hurt, his own pain, and he blames her for it, and you, and, by extension, the world. He doesn’t care about Ellen Cole, or Walter, or Lee. He’s all full up pissing and cursing at the bum hand he thinks life has dealt him, and that hand ain’t never gonna change.’
I looked at him, at his unshaven profile, the wisps of dark hair curling out from under his dark wool hat, the empty coffee cup forgotten in his hand. He was a mass of contradictions. It struck me that I was taking life lessons from a five-six semi-retired burglar whose boyfriend, not twenty-four hours earlier, had executed a man against a brick wall. My life, I reflected, was taking some strange turns.
Angel seemed to sense what I was thinking, because he turned to me before he spoke again. ‘We’ve been friends for a long time, you and me, maybe even without either of us realising it. I know you and, for a time, you weren’t far off becoming like Jennings and a million others like him, but I know now that’s not going to happen. I’m not sure how things changed and I don’t think I want to know most of it. All I know is that you’re becoming a compassionate man, Bird. That’s not the same as pity, or guilt, or trying to pay off some debt to fortune or to God. It’s feeling other people’s pain as your own, and acting to take that pain away. And maybe, sometimes, you have to do bad things to do that, but life doesn’t balance easy. You can be a good man and perform bad actions, because that’s the nature of things. People who believe otherwise, well, they’re just timeservers, because they spend so much time wrestling with their consciences that nothing gets done, and nothing changes, and the innocent and the defenceless, they just keep getting hurt. In the end you do what you can, maybe what you have to do, to make things better. Your heart isn’t going to be weighed against a feather in the next life, Bird. My guess is they do a comparative study, otherwise we’ll all end up in hell.’
He smiled at me, a small, wintry smile that said he knew the cost of following that philosophy. He knew, because he was following it himself: sometimes with me, sometimes with Louis, but always, always according to what he believed was right. I wasn’t sure that what he said could be applied to me. I made moral judgments in what I did, but I didn’t believe that I was always entitled to do so and I knew that I had not yet managed to purge myself of the guilt and grief I felt. I acted to ease my own pain and, in doing so, I sometimes managed to ease the pain of others. That was as close to compassion as I thought I could get, for the present.
From the far end of town came the sound of sirens, gradually drawing nearer. Red and blue lights flashed across the buildings on the main street as a cruiser tore around the corner and headed in our direction at high speed. It screeched a hard left at the intersection and drove by. In the front seat of the car I could see the figure of Randall Jennings.
‘Must be a doughnut sale on,’ remarked Angel.
A second unmarked car came down the main street, spun on its rear tyres as it made the turn, then headed after the first vehicle.
‘With free coffee,’ he added.
I tossed my keys in my hand, then nudged Angel off the hood of the Mustang, where he had just taken up a position. ‘I’m going to take a look. You want to come along?’
‘Nah. I’m a-waitin’ for Black Narcissus to finish making himself lovely for us. We’ll hang on for you, burn some furniture to keep warm.’
I followed the lights of the lead cars as they glanced against the trees, the branches like hands outstretched over the road. After a mile I caught up with them a
s they headed up into the forest through a private logging company road, the wooden barrier thrown to one side to enable the cars to pass. Beside the barrier stood a man wearing a wool hat and a parka. A path wound down behind him to a small house on the edge of the company land. I figured that maybe it was he who had made the call to the police.
I stayed close behind the rear car, watching its taillights as it swerved and dipped along the narrow, rutted track. Eventually the cruiser came to a halt beside a Ford truck with a ski-doo in back, a huge bearded man with a belly like a pregnant woman’s standing beside it. Jennings emerged from the lead car, Ressler stepping out of the car behind at the same time accompanied by another patrolman. Flashlights blinked into life and the line of three cops headed over to the back of the truck and peered inside. I took my own Maglite from the trunk and walked over to them. As I went, I heard the bearded man say:
‘I didn’t want to leave him out there. There’s snow coming on, means he might have been lost till the thaw.’
Faces turned towards me as I approached, one of them that of Rand Jennings.
‘The fuck are you doing here?’ he said.
‘Collecting berries. What you got?’
I shone my flashlight beam into the bed of the truck, although what was there didn’t need the extra illumination. It needed darkness and dirt and a headstone six feet above it.
It was a man’s body, laid out on a sheet of tarpaulin, his mouth wide open and filled with leaves. His eyes were closed and his head was twisted at an unnatural angle. He lay, crumpled and broken, amid the tools and plastic containers in the truck, his hair touching the empty gun rack.
‘Who is he?’
For a moment, I didn’t think Jennings was going to answer. Then he sighed and said:
‘It looks like Gary Chute. He was a surveyor for the timber company. Daryl here found him when he was out checking some traps. Came upon his truck back a ways as well, couple of miles from the body.’
Daryl looked like he was about to deny the traps part of the statement. His mouth opened briefly then closed again at a look from Jennings. Daryl looked kind of slow, I thought. His eyes were dull and his brow low, and his mouth, though closed, was in continual motion, as if he was worrying at the inside of his bottom lip with his teeth.