'I got the grand tour.'
'And what did you think?'
'It's a little light on crosses for my tastes.'
'Catholic?'
'Occasional.'
'I was raised in the Church of England – Low, I should add – and even I found Warraner's chapel positively austere.'
'The carvings apart.'
'Yes, they are interesting, aren't they? Unusual here in the United States. Less so, perhaps, among the older churches of England and certain parts of Europe, although Warraner's are quite distinctive. It's a Familist church, of that there can be little doubt, but a Familist chuch of a particular type. This is not the element of the sect that fed into the Quakers or the Unitarians, infused with a spirit of peace and gentleness. It's something harsher.'
'And Warraner: is he still a Familist?'
Williamson fnished his coffee. He seemed to be considering making another, then thought better of it. He put his cup down.
'Yes, Mr Parker,' he said. 'I believe that not only is Warraner a Familist, but Prosperous remains a Familist community. To what end, I couldn't say.'
'And their god?'
'Look again at those carvings inside the church, if you get the chance. My suspicion is that, somewhere along the line, the link between God – the Christian deity – and the rule of nature has become lost to Warraner and those who share his religious convictions. All that's left is those carvings. For the people of Prosperous, they are the faces of their god.'
I stood to leave. As I did so, Williamson handed me the books from his desk.
'I thought these might interest you,' he said. 'Just pop them in the post when you're done with them.'
There he was again, 'pop'-ing and putting things in the 'post'. He caught me smiling.
'Did I say something funny?'
'I was just wondering how many dates you'd gotten in the United States because of that accent of yours.'
He grinned. 'It did seem to make me very popular. I suspect I may even have married out of my league because of it.'
'It's the residual colonial admiration for the oppressor.'
'Spoken like a history major.'
'No, not me, but Warraner said something similar when I met him. He drew an analogy between detection and historical research.'
'But aren't all investigations historical?' said Williamson. 'The crime is committed in the past, and the investigation conducted in the present. It's a form of excavation.'
'Do you feel a paper coming on?'
'You know, I might do, at that.'
I ficked through the frst of the books. It was heavily illustrated with images and drawings.
'Pictures, too,' I said.
'If you color any of them in, we may be forced to have a long talk.'
'One last question?' I said.
'Go right ahead.'
'Why are so many of these faces threatening or hostile?'
'Fear,' said Williamson. 'Fear of the power of nature, fear of old gods. And perhaps, too, the early Church found in such depictions a literal representation of a metaphorical concept: the radix malorum, the "root of all evil". Hell, if you choose to believe in it, is beneath our feet, not above our heads. You'd have to dig deep to fnd it, but it wasn't diffcult for Christians with ancient links to the land to conceive of the infuence of the malefcent in terms of twisted roots and clinging ivy, of faces formed by something buried far beneath the earth trying to create a physical representation of itself from whatever materials were at hand. But the god depicted on the walls of the Prosperous chapel has no connection with Christianity. It's older, and beyond conceptions of good and evil. It simply is.'
'You sound almost as though you believe in it yourself.'
'Perhaps I just sometimes fnd it easier to understand how someone could conceive and worship a god of tree and leaf, a god that formed as the land around it formed, than a bearded fgure living on a cloud in the sky.'
'Does that count as a crisis of faith?'
He grinned again. 'No, only a natural consequence of the study of every shade of religious belief, and of trying to teach the importance of being tolerant in a world in which tolerance is associated with weakness or heresy.'
'Let me guess: you and Michael Warraner didn't exactly see eye to eye on that subject.'
'No. He wasn't hostile toward other forms of religious belief, merely uninterested.'
'When I see him again, should I pass on your good wishes?' I said.
'I'd prefer if you didn't,' said Williamson.
'Frightened?'
'Wary. You should be too.' He was no longer distracted, no longer smiling. 'One of the challenges I like to set my students for their frst class is a word-association game. I ask them to list all of the words, positive or negative, that come to mind when they think of god. Sometimes I get pages of words, at other times a handful, but Warraner was the only student who ever wrote just one solitary word. That word was "hunger". He and those like him worship a hungry god, Mr 'Parker, and no good can ever come of worshipping a deity that hungers. No good at all.'
37
Idrove back to Scarborough, but stopped off at Bull Moose
Music's massive warehouse store on Payne Road and browsed the racks for an hour. It was part pleasure, part displacement activity. I felt that I'd reached a dead end as far as Prosperous was concerned, and my talk with Williamson had only served to confrm my own suspicions about Prosperous without opening any new avenues of inquiry.
I was no closer to fnding Annie Broyer than I had been when I started out, and I was beginning to wonder if I might not have been mistaken in assuming that everything I had learned over the past week was useful or even true: an elderly couple, a blue car, a passing reference to a job in Prosperous made to a woman with the mental capacities of a child, and a homeless man's obsession with the carvings on an ancient church. Every piece of information I had gathered was open to question, and it was entirely possible that Annie Broyer might turn up in Boston, or Chicago, or Seattle over the days and weeks to come. Even Lucas Morland's passing reference to Annie as an 'ex-junkie' could be explained away if he had made a simple phone call to Portland or Bangor after my frst visit to the town. In the eyes of some, I had already violated the primary commandment of an investigation: don't assume. Don't create patterns where there are none. Don't conceive of a narrative and then force the evidence to ft it. On the other hand, all investigations involve a degree of speculation, the capacity to bear witness to a crime and imagine a chain of events that might have caused that crime to be committed. An investigation was not simply a matter of historical research, as Warraner had suggested. It was an act of faith both in one's own capacities and in the possibility of justice in a world that had made justice subservient to the rule of law.
But I had no crime to investigate. I had only a homeless man with a history of depression who might well have hanged himself in a ft of desperation, and a missing girl with a history of narcotic and alcohol abuse who had drifted for most of her life. Was I fxating on Prosperous because its citizens were wealthy and privileged while Jude and his daughter were poor and suffering? Was I marking Warraner and Morland for simply doing what a pastor and a policeman should do, which was to protect their people?
And yet . . .
Michael Warraner wasn't quite a fraud, but something potentially much more dangerous: a frustrated man with a set of religious or spiritual principles that reinforced his infated opinion of himself and his place in the world. It was also clear from the way Morland reacted to my unauthorized visit to the church that Warraner had a position of authority in the town, which meant there were infuential individuals who either shared his beliefs or didn't entirely discount them.
What all that had to do – if anything – with the disappearance of Annie and the death of her father, I did not know. Prosperous just felt wrong to me, and I'd grown to trust my feelings. Then again, Angel and Louis might have asked if I ever felt right about anything, and if I'd learned to trust th
ose feelings too. I could have countered by replying that nobody ever asked for my help when there wasn't a problem, but I then found myself growing annoyed that I was having arguments – and more to the point, losing them – with Angel and Louis even when they weren't actually present.
I headed into Portland, where I caught a movie at the Nickelodeon and then ate a burger at The Little Tap House on High Street. The building had once housed Katahdin before that restaurant's move to Forest Avenue. A tapas place had briefy occupied the location in the aftermath of the move, and now The Little Tap House had carved out a niche for itself as a neighborhood bar with good food. I drank a soda and tried to read a little of the books with which Williamson had entrusted me. They traced the development of foliate sculpture from at least the frst century AD, through its adoption by the early Church, and on to its proliferation throughout Western Europe. Some of the illustrations were more graphic than others. My server seemed particularly concerned at a capital in the cathedral at Autun which depicted a man disappearing into the jaws of a leafed face. Many of the carvings, such as a thirteenth-century mask from Bamberg cathedral, had a kind of beauty to them, which rendered them even more sinister.
I did fnd a source for Williamson's Latin reference: the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus, in which Satan was described as radix omnium malorum, root of all evil, alongside a picture of a tricephalos, a three-faced demon from the façade of San Pietro in Tuscany, Italy. Coiling tendrils pushed through the mouths of the demons, extrusions from the original root, and the text described them as 'blood-suckers' in the context of another ffteenth-century head from Melrose Abbey. Here, too, there was a reference to the relationship between the human and plant elements in the masks as essentially hostile or parasitic, although the general consensus seemed to be that they represented a type of symbiosis, a long-term interaction and mutually benefcial relationship between two species. Man received the benefts of nature's fruits, or the rebirth wrought by the changing of the seasons, and in return—
Well, that last part wasn't so clear, although the cathedral at Autun with its images of consumption offered one possible realm of speculation.
I closed the books, paid my tab, and left the bar. The weather had warmed up a little since the previous night – not by much, but the weathermen were already predicting that the worst of winter was now behind us for another year, prematurely, I suspected. The sky was clear as I drove home, and the saltwater marshes smelled fresh and clean as I parked outside my house. I walked around to the back door to enter by the kitchen. It had become a habit with me ever since Rachel and Sam moved out. Entering by the front door and seeing the empty hallway was somehow more depressing than going in through the kitchen, which was where I spent most of my time anyway. I opened the door and reached out to key in the alarm code when my dead daughter spoke to me from behind. She said just one word
daddy
and it contained within it the prospect of living and the hope of dying, of endings and beginnings, of love and loss and peace and rage, all wrapped up in two whispered syllables.
I was already diving to the foor when the frst of the shotgun blasts hit me, the pellets tearing the skin from my back, the hair from my skull, the fesh from my bones. I burned. I found the strength to kick at the door, knocking it closed, but the second blast blew away the lock and most of the glass, showering me with slivers and splinters. The foor was slick with my blood as I tried to rise, my feet sliding in the redness. I somehow stumbled into the hallway, and now pistol shots were sounding from behind me. I felt the force of their impact in my back, and my shoulder, and my side. I went down again, but as the pain took hold I found it in myself to twist my body to the left. I screamed as I landed on the foor, but I was now halfway across the doorway of my offce. My right hand found the corner of the wall, and I dragged myself inside. Again I kicked a door closed, and managed to seat myself upright against my desk. I drew my gun. I raised it and fred a round. I didn't know what it hit. I didn't care. It was enough that it was in my hand.
'Come on,' I said, and blood and spittle sprayed from my lips. 'Come on!' I said, louder now, and I did not know if I was speaking to myself, or to whatever or whomever lay beyond the door.
'Come on,' I said a third time, to the approaching darkness, to the fgures that beckoned from within it, to the peace that comes at last to every dead thing. Above it all sounded the wailing of the alarm.
I fred again, and two bullets tore through the door in response. One missed.
The other did not.
'Come—'
The wolf looked up at the men who surrounded him. He had tried to gnaw his trapped paw off, but had not succeeded. Now he was weary. The time had come. He snarled at the men, the fur around his mouth wet with his own blood. A sharp bitter scent troubled his senses, the smell of noise and dying.
He barked, the fnal sound that he would ever make. In it was both defance and a kind of resignation. He was calling on death to come for him.
The gun fred, and the wolf was gone.
'Hold him! Hold him!'
Light. No light.
'Jesus, I can't even get a grip on him, there's so much blood. Okay, on three. One, two—'
'Ah, for Christ's sake.'
'His back is just meat. What the fuck happened here?'
Light. No light.
Light. No light. Light.
'Can you hear me?'
Yes. No. I saw the paramedic. I saw Sharon Macy behind him. I tried to speak, but no words would come.
'Mr Parker, can you hear me?'
Light. Stronger now. 'You stay with me, you hear me? You stay!'
Up. Move. Ceiling. Lights.
Stars.
Darkness.
Gone.
38
The house, larger than most of its neighbors, lay on a
nondescript road midway between Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach on the Delaware coast. Most of the surrounding homes were vacation rentals or summer places used by Washingtonians with a little money to spend. Transience was the norm here. True, a handful of year-round residents lived on the road, but they tended to mind their own business, and left others to mind theirs.
A signifcant number of the homes in the area were owned by gay couples, for Rehoboth had long been one of the east coast's most gay-friendly resorts. This was perhaps surprising given that Rehoboth was founded in 1873 by the Reverend Robert W. Todd as a Methodist meeting camp. Reverend Todd's vision of a religious community was short-lived, though, and by the 1940s the gay Hollywood crowd were carousing at the DuPont property along the ocean. Then came the Pink Pony Bar in the 1950s, and the Pleasant Inn and the Nomad Village in the 1960s, all known to be welcoming to DC's more closeted citizens. In the 1990s, some of the town's less tolerant residents made a vain attempt to restore what were loosely termed 'family values', in some cases by beating the shit out of anyone who even looked gay, but negotiations among representatives of the gay community, homeowners and the police largely put an end to the unrest, and Rehoboth settled gently into its role not only as the 'Nation's Summer Capital', but the 'Nation's Gay Summer Capital'.
The big house was rarely occupied, even by the standards of vacation homes. Neither was its care entrusted to any of the local realtors, many of whom boosted their income by acting as agents for summer rentals, and taking care of houses over the winter months. Nevertheless, it was well kept, and local rumor suggested that it had either been bought as part of some complicated tax write-off, in which case the fewer questions asked about it the better, especially in an area swarming with Washingtonians who might or might not have connections with the IRS; or as a corporate investment, for its ownership apparently lay with a shelf company, itself a part of another shelf company, on and on like a series of seemingly infnite matryoshka dolls.
And now, with the fnal hold of winter upon the land, and the beaches largely empty and devoid of life, the house at last was occupied. Two men, one young and one old, had been noticed entering and leavin
g, although they did not socialize in any of the local bars and restaurants, and the older gentleman appeared somewhat frail.
But two men, of whatever vintages, living together was not so unusual in Rehoboth Beach, and so their presence went largely unremarked.
Inside the house, the Collector brooded by a window. There was no view of the sea here, only a line of trees that protected the house and its occupants from the curiosity of others. The furnishings were largely antiques, some acquired through clever investment but most through bequests, and occasionally by means of outright theft. The Collector viewed such acquisitions as little more than his due. After all, the previous owners had no more use for them, the previous owners being, without exception, dead.