The Wolf in Winter

  'Mr Danes?' I said.

  He raised his right hand while the fountain pen in his left continued to scrawl across the page. His notes were longer than the report itself. I could almost hear the rise of frustrated sighs at some future meeting as Euclid Danes stood, cleared his throat and began to speak.

  A long time went by. My coffee came. I added milk. I took a sip. Oceans rose and fell, and mountains collapsed to dust. Finally Euclid Danes fnished his work, capped his pen and aligned it with the paper on which he had been working. He clasped his hands and looked up at me with young, curious eyes. There was mischief in them. Euclid Danes might have been the bane of life in Dearden, but he was smart enough to know it, and bright enough to enjoy it.

  'How can I help you?' he said.

  'You mind if I take a seat?'

  'Not at all.' He waved at a chair.

  'Your French fries?' I said, pointing at the plate.

  'They were.'

  'Your sister is going to be annoyed that you've eaten.'

  'My sister is always annoyed, whether I eat or not. Is she now hiring detectives to monitor my habits?'

  I tried not to show surprise.

  'Did she call ahead?'

  'To warn me? She wouldn't do that. She's probably at home praying that you make me disappear. No, I read the papers and watch the news, and I have a good memory for faces. You're Charlie Parker, out of Portland.'

  'You make me sound like a gunfghter.'

  'Yes, I do, don't I?', he said, and his eyes twinkled. 'So how can I help you, Mr Parker?'

  The waitress appeared and freshened my coffee.

  'I'd like to talk to you about Prosperous,' I said.

  Chief Morland picked up Harry Dixon at his home. He didn't inform Harry why he needed him, just told him to get his coat and a pair of gloves. Morland already had a spade, his pickax and fashlights in the car. He was tempted to ask Bryan Joblin to join them but instead told him to wait with Harry's wife. Morland didn't want her to panic and do something stupid. He could see the way she was looking at him while Harry went to fetch his coat, like he was ready to put her husband in the ground, but it hadn't come to that, not yet.

  'It's all right,' said Morland. 'I'll bring him back in one piece. I just need his help.'

  Erin Dixon didn't reply. She sat at the kitchen counter, staring him down. She won, or he let her win. He wasn't sure which. In either event, he simply looked away.

  Bryan Joblin was sitting by the fre, drinking a PBR and watching some dumb quiz show. Bryan was useful because he didn't think much, and he did what he was told. A purpose could always be found for men like that. Empires were built on their backs.

  'How long is he going to stay here?' said Erin, pointing at Bryan with her chin. If Bryan heard her, he didn't respond. He took another sip of his beer and tried to fgure out on which continent the Republic of Angola was situated.

  'Just until the next girl is found,' said Morland. 'How's that coming along?'

  'I've driven around some, as has Harry,' said Erin. 'It would be easier if we could move without that fool tagging along with us everywhere.'

  Bryan Joblin still didn't react. He was lost in his show. He'd guessed Asia, and was smacking the arm of his chair in frustation. Bryan would never serve on the board of selectmen, not unless every other living thing in Prosperous, cats and dogs included, predeceased him.

  Morland knew that Bryan alternated his vigils between Harry and his wife. He was currently helping Harry out with an attic conversion on the outskirts of Bangor. Bryan might not have been smart, but he was good with his hands once he worked up the energy to act. In practical terms there wasn't much Bryan could do if either Harry or Erin decided to try something dumb while he was with the other spouse, but his presence was a reminder of the town's power. It was psychological pressure, albeit with a physical threat implied.

  'As soon as we have a girl, he'll be gone,' said Morland. 'You brought him on yourselves. You brought all of this on yourselves.'

  Harry had reappeared with his coat. He'd taken his time. Morland wondered what he'd been doing.

  Harry patted his wife gently on the shoulder as he passed her. She reached out to grasp his hand, but it was too late. He had moved on.

  'You have any idea how long we're going to be?' he asked Morland.

  'Couple of hours. You got gloves?'

  Harry removed a pair from his pocket. He always had gloves. They were part of his uniform.

  'Then let's go,' said Morland. 'Sooner we get started, sooner we fnish.'

  *

  Euclid Danes asked me why I was interested in Prosperous.

  'I'd prefer not to say,' I told him. I didn't want the details to end up in one of Euclid's fles, ready to be raised at the next meeting.

  'You don't trust me?' said Euclid.

  'I don't know you.'

  'So how did you fnd out about me?'

  'Mr Danes, you're all over the Internet like some kind of cyber rash. I'm surprised that the residents of Prosperous haven't paid to have you taken out.'

  'They don't much care for me up there,' he admitted.

  'I'm curious to know what your beef is with that town. You seem to be expending a lot of energy to insert splinters under the fngernails of its citizenry.'

  'Is that what they are – citizenry?' he said. 'I'd say "cultists" was a better word to use.'

  I waited. I was good at waiting. Euclid pulled a sheet of blank paper from a sheaf and drew a circle at the center of the page.

  'This is Prosperous,' he said. He then added a series of arrows pointing out toward a number of smaller circles. 'Here are Dearden, Thomasville and Lake Plasko. Beyond them, you have Bangor, Augusta, Portland. Prosperous sends its people out – to work, to learn, to worship – but it's careful about whom it admits. It needs fresh blood because it doesn't want to start breeding idiots in a shallow gene pool, so in the last half-century or so it's allowed its children to marry outsiders, but it keeps those new family units at arm's length until it's sure that they're compatible with the town. Houses aren't sold to those who weren't born in Prosperous, nor businesses either. The same goes for land, or what little the town has left to develop. Which is where I come in.'

  'Because Prosperous wants to expand,' I said, 'and you're in the way.'

  'Give that man a candy bar. The original founders of the town chose a location bounded by lakes, and marshland, and deep woods, apart from a channel of land to the southeast. Basically they created their own little fortress, but now it's come back to bite them. If they want their children to continue to live in Prosperous then they need space on which to build, and the town has almost run out of land suitable for development. It's not yet critical, but it's getting there, and Prosperous always plans ahead.'

  'You make it sound like the town is a living thing.'

  'Isn't it?' said Euclid. 'All towns are a collection of organisms forming a single entity, like a jellyfsh. In the case of Prosperous, the controlling organisms are the original founding families, and their bloodlines have remained unpolluted. They control the board of selectmen, the police force, the school board, every institution of consequence. The same names recur throughout the history of Prosperous. They're the guardians of the town.

  'And just like a jellyfsh, Prosperous has long tentacles that trail. Its people worship at mainstream churches, although all in towns outside Prosperous itself, because Prosperous only has room for one church. It places children of the founding families in the surrounding towns, including here in Dearden. It gives them money to run for local and state offce, to support charities, to help out with donations to worthwhile causes when the state can't or won't. After a couple of gener ations it gets so that people forget that these are creatures of Prosperous, and whatever they do aims to beneft Prosperous frst and foremost. It's in their nature, from way back when they frst came here as the remnants of the Family of Love. You know what the Family of Love is?'

  'I've read up on it,' I said.

 
'Yeah, Family of Love my old ass. There was no love in those people. They weren't about to become no Quakers. I think that's why they left England. They were killing to protect themselves, and they had blood on their hands. Either they left or they were going to be buried by their enemies.'

  'Pastor Warraner claims that may just have been propaganda. The Familists were religious dissenters. The same lies were spread about Catholics and Jews.'

  'Warraner,' said Euclid, and the name was like a fy that had somehow entered his mouth and needed to be spat from the tip of his tongue. 'He's no more a pastor than I am. He can call himself what he wants, but there's no good in him. And to correct you on another point, the Familists weren't just dissenters: they were infltrators. They hid among established congregations and paid lip service to beliefs that weren't their own. I don't believe that's changed much down the years. They're still an infection. They're parasites, turning the body against itself.'

  It was a metaphor I had heard used before, under other circumstances. It evoked unpleasant associations with people who unwittingly sheltered old spirits inside them, ancient angels waiting for the moment when they could start to consume their hosts from within.

  Unfortunately for Euclid Danes, his talk of jellyfsh and parasites and bloodlines made him sound like a paranoid obsessive. Perhaps he was. But Euclid was smart – smart enough, at least, to guess the direction of my thoughts.

  'Sounds crazy, doesn't it?' he said. 'Sounds like the ravings of a madman?'

  'I wouldn't put it that strongly.'

  'You'd be in the minority, but it's easy enough to prove. Dearden is decaying, but compared to Thomasville it's like Las Vegas. Our kids are leaving because there's no work, and no hope of any. Businesses are closing, and those that stay open sell only stuff that old farts like me need. The towns in this whole region are slowly dying, all except Prosperous. It's suffering, because everywhere is suffering, but not like we are. It's insulated. It's protected. It sucks the life out of the surrounding towns to feed itself. Good fortune, luck, divine providence – call it what you will, but there's only so much of it to go around, and Prosperous has taken it all.'

  The waitress with the big hair came by to offer me yet more coffee. I was the only person in the bar who seemed to be drinking it, and she clearly didn't want to waste the pot. I had a long ride home. It would help me to stay awake. I drank it quickly, though. I didn't think there was much more that Euclid Danes could tell me.

  'Are there others like you?' I asked.

  'Whackjobs? Paranoiacs? Fantasists?'

  'How about "dissenters"?'

  He smiled at the co-opting of the word. 'Some. Enough. They keep quieter about it than I do, though. It doesn't pay to cross the folk up in Prosperous. It starts with small things – a dog going missing, damage to your car, maybe a call to the IRS to say that you're taking in a little work on the side to cover your bar tab – but then it escalates. It's not only the economy that has led to businesses closing around here, and families leaving.'

  'But you've stayed.'

  He picked up his fountain pen and unscrewed the cap, ready to return to his papers. I glimpsed the name on the pen: Tibaldi. I looked it up later. They started at about $400 and went up to $40,000. The one that Euclid Danes used had a lot of gold on it.

  'I look like the crazy old coot who lives in a rundown house with more dogs than bugs and a sister who can only cook meatloaf,' he said, 'but my brother was a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, my nephews and nieces are lawyers and bankers, and there's nothing anyone can teach me about playing the markets. I have money and a degree of infuence. I think that's why they hate me so much: because, except for an accident of birth, I could have been one of them. Even though I'm not, they still feel that I should side with wealth and privilege because I'm wealthy and privileged myself.

  'So Prosperous can't move against me, and it can't frighten me. All it can do is wait for me to die, and even then those bastards will fnd I've tied so much legal ribbon around my land that humanity itself will die out before they fnd a way to build on it. It's been good talking with you, Mr Parker. I wish you luck with whatever it is that you're investigating.'

  He put his head down and began writing again. I was reminded of the end of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, when Gene Wilder dismisses Charlie and tries to lose himself in his papers until the boy returns the Everlasting Gobstopper as a token of recompense. I hadn't shared all that I knew with Euclid because I was cautious. I had underestimated and misjudged him, although I thought Euclid might have done the same with me.

  'A homeless man named Jude hanged himself down in Portland not long ago,' I said. 'He was looking for his daughter before he died. Her name was Annie Broyer. He was convinced that she'd gone to Prosperous. There's still no trace of her. I think she's dead, and I'm not alone in believing it. I also think that she may have met her end in Prosperous.'

  Euclid stopped writing. The cap went back on the pen. He straightened his tie and reached for his coat.

  'Mr Parker, why don't you and I take a ride?'

  It was already dark. I had followed Euclid Danes to the northwestern limit of the town of Dearden. His fence marked the boundary. Beyond it lay woodland: part of the township of Prosperous.

  'Why haven't they built here?' I asked. 'The land's suitable. It would just mean knocking down some trees.'

  Euclid took a small fashlight from his pocket and shone it on the ground. There was a hole in the earth, perhaps eighteen inches in diameter, or a little more. It was partly obscured by undergrowth and tree roots.

  'What is it?' I asked.

  'I don't know. I've found three of them over the years, but there may be more. I know for sure that there are a couple around that old church of theirs. I haven't seen them myself for some time – as you can imagine, I'm persona non grata in Prosperous – but I have it on good authority from others who've been there.'

  'You think the ground is unstable?'

  'Might be. I'm no expert.'

  I was no expert either, but this wasn't karst terrain, not as far as I was aware. I hadn't heard of any Florida-style sinkholes appearing in the area. The hole was curious, unsettling even, but that might have been a vague atavistic dread of small, enclosed places beneath the earth, and the fear of collapse they brought with them. I wasn't claustrophobic, but then I'd never been trapped in a hole below the ground.

  'What made it?'

  Euclid killed the fashlight.

  'Ah, that's the interesting question, isn't it?' he said. 'I'll leave that one with you. All I know is that I have meatloaf waiting, with a side of indigestion to follow. I'd ask you to join me, but I like you.'

  He began to walk back to his car. I stayed by the fence. I could still make out the hole, a deeper blackness against the encroaching dark. I felt an itching in my scalp, as though bugs were crawling through my hair.

  Euclid called back a fnal piece of advice when he reached his car. He was driving a beautiful old '57 Chevy Bel Air in red. 'I like them to know I'm coming,' he had told me. Now he stood beside its open door, a chill breeze toying with his wispy hair and his wide tie.

  'Good luck with those people up there,' he said. 'Just watch where you put your feet.'

  He turned on the ignition and kept the Chevy's lights trained on the ground in front of me until I was safely back at my own car. I followed him as far as his house, then continued south, and home.

  On the outskirts of Prosperous, Lucas Morland and Harry Dixon were staring at another hole in the ground. At frst Harry had been struck by the absurd yet terrible thought that the girl had actually dug herself out, just as he had dreamed, and what had crawled from that grave was something much worse than a wounded young woman who could name names. But then their fashlights had picked out the big paw prints on the scattered earth and the broken bones and the teeth marks upon them. They found the head under an old oak, most of the face gnawed away.

  'I told you,' said Harry to Morland. 'I told
you I saw a wolf.'

  Morland said nothing, but began gathering up what he could retrieve of the remains. Harry joined him. They couldn't fnd all of the girl. The wolf, or some other scavenger, had carried parts of her away. There was an arm missing, and most of one leg.

  Evidence, thought Morland. It's evidence. It would have to be found. For now, all he could do was put what they could collect of the girl into more of the plastic sheeting, put it in the car and refll the grave. Nothing like this, nothing so terrible, so unlucky, had happened in Prosperous for generations. If the girl hadn't run. If Dixon and his bitch wife hadn't let her escape . . .