Yet she had never regarded herself as neglected. When she began having trouble at school – acting up in class, crying in the restrooms – as she entered adolescence, he spoke to the principal and arranged for Emily to see a psychologist, although she chose to share as little with the kindly, soft-spoken man in the rimless glasses as she did with her father. She did not want to speak with a psychologist. She did not want to be perceived as different in any way, and so she did not tell him of the headaches, or the blackouts, or the dreams that she had in which something was emerging from a dark pit in the ground, a thing with teeth that gnawed at her soul. She did not speak of her paranoia, or the sense that her identity was a fragile thing that could be lost and broken at any time. After ten sessions, the psychologist concluded that she was a normal, if sensitive, girl who would, in time, find her place in the world. There was the possibility that her difficulties presaged something more serious, a form of schizophrenia, perhaps, and he advised both her and, particularly, her father to be aware of any significant changes in her behavior. Her father had looked at her differently after that, and twice in the months that followed she had woken to find him standing at the door to her room. When she’d asked what was wrong, he told her that she had been shouting in her sleep, and she wondered if he had heard what she might have said.
Her father worked as a driver for a furniture warehouse: Trejo & Sons, Inc., Mexicans who had made good. Her father was the only non-Mexican who worked for the Trejos. She did not know why this was. When she asked her father he admitted that he did not know either. Maybe it was because he drove his truck well, but she thought it might have been the fact that the Trejos sold many types of furniture, some of it expensive and some of it not, to many different types of people, some of them Mexicans and some of them not. Her father had a sense of authority about him, and he spoke well. For their wealthier customers, he was the acceptable face of the Trejos.
Every piece of furniture in their home had been bought at a discount from his employers, usually because it was damaged, or torn, or so ugly that all hope of ever selling it had been abandoned. Her father had cut and sanded the legs on the kitchen table in an effort to make them even, but the result was that the table seemed too low, and the chairs could not be pushed under it when they had finished eating. The couches in the living room were comfortable but mismatched, and the rugs and carpets were cheap but hard-wearing. Only the succession of TVs that graced one corner of the room were of any quality, and her father regularly upgraded the sets when a better model came on the market. He watched history documentaries and game shows. He rarely watched sports. He wanted to know things, to learn and, in silence, his daughter learned alongside him.
When she finally left, she wondered if he would even notice. She suspected that he might be grateful for her absence. Only later did it strike her that he had seemed almost frightened of her.
She found another waitressing job, this one in the closest thing to a boho coffeehouse the town could boast. It didn’t pay much, but then her rent wasn’t very much either, and at least they played good music and the rest of the staff weren’t total assholes. She was supplementing her income with weekend bar work, which wasn’t so pleasant, but she had already met a guy who seemed to like her. He had come in with some of his buddies to watch a hockey game, but he was different from them, and he had flirted with her some. He had a nice smile, and he didn’t swear like his buddies, which she admired in a man. He’d returned a couple of times since then, and she could feel him working up the courage to ask her out. She wasn’t sure that she was ready yet, though, not after what had happened before, and she still wasn’t certain about him. There was something there, though, something that interested her. If he asked, she would say yes, but she would keep some space between them as she tried to find out more about him. She did not want things to turn out the way they had with Bobby, at the end.
On her fourth night in the new town, she woke to a vision of a man and a woman walking up the street toward her rented apartment. It was so vivid that she went to the window and looked out at the world beyond, expecting to see two figures standing beneath the nearest streetlight, but the town was quiet, and the street was empty. In her dream, she had almost been able to see their faces. The dream had been coming to her for many years now, but it was only recently that the features of the man and woman had begun to seem clearer to her, growing sharper with each visitation. She could not yet recognize them, but she knew that the time was coming when she would be able to do so.
There would be a reckoning then. Of that, at least, she was certain.
III
So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away,
Turn thou ghost that way, and let me turn this . . .
John Donne (1572–1631), ‘The Expiration’
14
I spent each Friday at the Bear dealing with our biggest distributor, Nappi. The Bear took delivery of beer three times a week, but Nappi accounted for eighty percent of all our taps, so its consignment was a big deal. The Nappi truck always arrived on Fridays, and once the thirty kegs had been checked and stored, and I had paid for the delivery according to the Bear’s COD policy, I would buy the driver lunch on my tab, and we would talk about beer, and his family, and the downturn in the economy.
The Bear had a slightly different yardstick from most bars by which to judge how things were going for its customers. The bar had always been popular with repo men, and we had seen increasing numbers of them parking their trucks in the lot. It wasn’t a job I would have cared to do, but the majority of them were pretty philosophical about it. They could afford to be. They were, with only a couple of exceptions, big, hard men, although the toughest of them, Jake Elms, who was eating a burger and checking his phone at the bar, was only five-five and tipped the scales at barely 120 pounds. He was soft-spoken, and I had never heard him swear, but the stories that circulated about him were legendary. He traveled with a mangy terrier in the front of his truck, and kept an aluminum baseball bat in a rack beneath the dashboard. As far as I was aware, he did not own a gun, but that bat had broken some heads in its time, and Jake’s dog was reputed to have the singular talent of being able to grip a man’s testicles in its jaws and then dangle from them, growling, if anyone had the temerity to threaten its beloved owner.
The dog, needless to say, wasn’t allowed in the bar.
‘I hate this time of year,’ said Nathan, the Nappi driver, as he finished off his wrap and prepared to head out into the cold. ‘I ought to find me a job down in Florida.’
‘You like the heat?’
‘No, I don’t much care for it. But this—’ He gestured at the world beyond the dark cocoon of the Bear as he shrugged on his coat. ‘They can call it spring, but it’s not. This is still the dead of winter.’
He was right. There were only three seasons in this place, or so it seemed: winter, summer, and fall. There was no spring. Already, it was the middle of February, yet there were no real signs of returning life, no hints of renewal. The streets of the city were fortified with ramparts of snow and ice, the wider sidewalks etched with the treads of the machines that had cleared them over and over. True, the worst of the snow had departed, but in its place had come freezing rain and the dread siege of lingering cold, augmented at times by high winds, but, even in its stillest form, capable of turning ears and noses and fingertips raw. Sheltered streets were caked with patches of ice, some visible and some not. Those that sloped upward from Commercial into the Old Port were treacherous to tackle without grips on one’s soles, and the cobblestone paving, so beloved of the tourists, did nothing to make the ascent any less hazardous. The task of sweeping the floors of bars and restaurants was rendered more tedious by the accumulation of slush and ice, of grit and rock salt. In places – by the parking lots on Middle Street, or down by the wharfs – the accumulated piles of snow and ice were so high as to give the impression that pedestrians were engaged in
a form of trench warfare. Some of the ice chunks were as big as boulders, as though expelled from the depths of some strange, near-frozen volcano.
On the wharfs, the lobster boats were shrouded in snow. Occasionally, a brave soul would make a foray out onto the bay and, when he returned, the blood of the fish would stain the ice pink and red, but mostly the seagulls fluttered disconsolately, waiting for summer and the return of easy pickings. At night, there was the sound of tires seeking purchase on treacherous ice, of feet stamping impatiently as keys were sought, and of laughter that teetered on the brink of tears at the pain that the cold brought.
And March still waited in the wings, a miserable month of dripping ice and melting snow and the last vestiges of winter lurking filthily in shadowy places. Then April, and May. Summer, and warmth, and tourists.
But, for now, there was only winter without the promise of spring. Here there were only ice and snow, and the traces of old footprints retained amid the crystals like unwanted memories that refused to die. The people huddled together, and waited for the siege to break. But that day, the day that Nathan spoke of the dead of winter, brought something strange and different to this part of the world.
It brought the mist.
It brought them.
It had been bitterly cold for days, weeks, unusually so even for the time of year. Snow had fallen day after day, and then, just before Valentine’s Day, it turned to freezing rain that flooded streets and turned the drifts of accumulated snow to rugged slabs of ice. Then the rain stopped, but the cold stayed, until at last the weather broke, and temperatures climbed.
And the mist rose off the white fields like smoke from a cold burning, carried by air currents unfelt by man so that it seemed almost a living thing, a pale manifestation with a purpose untold and unknown. The shapes of the trees became indistinguishable, the forests lost to the enveloping fog. It did not diminish or falter, but appeared to grow denser and deeper as the day drew on, dampening the towns and cities and falling like soft rain on windows and cars and people. By nightfall visibility was down to a matter of feet, and the highway signs flashed warnings about speed and distance.
And still the mist came. It took over the city, turning the brightest lights to ghosts of themselves, cutting off those who walked the streets from others like them, so that all felt alone in the world. In its way, it brought closer together those with families and other loved ones for they sought solace with one another, a point of contact in a world that had grown suddenly unfamiliar.
Perhaps that was why they came back, or did I still believe that they had never quite departed to begin with? I had set them free, these ghosts of my wife and child. I had asked their forgiveness for my failings, and I had taken all that I had retained of their lives – clothes and toys, dresses and shoes – and burned them in my yard. I had felt them leave, following the marsh streams into the waiting sea beyond, and when I set foot in the house again, the smell of smoke and lost things thick upon me, it seemed different to me: lighter, somehow, as though a little of the clutter had been cleared from it, or an old, stale odor banished by the breezes through open windows.
They were my ghosts, of course. I had created them, in my way. I had given form to them, making my anger and grief and loss their own, so that they became to me hostile things, with all that I had once loved about them gone, and all that I hated about myself filling the void. And they took that shape and accepted it, because it was their way to return to this world, my world. They were not ready to slip into the shadows of memory, to relinquish their place in this life.
And I did not understand why.
But that was not them. That was not the wife I had loved, however poorly, and the daughter I had once cherished. I had caught glimpses of them as they truly were, before I allowed them to be transformed. I saw my dead wife leading the ghost of a boy into a deep forest, his small hand in hers, and I knew that he felt no fear of her. She was the Summer Lady, taking him to those whom he had lost, accompanying him on his last journey through the thickets and trees. And so that he would not be frightened, so that he would not be alone, there was another with him, a girl close to his own age who skipped in winter sunlight as she waited for her playmate to arrive.
This was my wife and child. This was their true form. What I released in smoke and flames were my ghosts. What returned with the mist were their own.
I worked that night. I was not scheduled to do so, but Al and Lorraine, two of the regular bartenders who had been living together for almost as long as they had been working at the Bear, were involved in a collision on Route 1 not far from Scarborough Downs, and both were taken to the hospital as a precaution. With nobody to cover for them, I had to spend another night behind the bar. I was still tired from the night before, but there was nothing to be done except to keep going. I figured that I could probably get an extra day in comp time from Dave, which would give me a few more hours to spend in New York the following week, but for now it was just me and Gary and Dave, serving up beers and burgers and trying to keep our heads above water.
Mickey Wallace had planned to talk to Parker again at the Bear that day, but an incident in the motel parking lot had caused him to reconsider. A man who had been sitting at the bar earlier in the week, the one who had been flirting with the little redhead, was waiting beside Mickey’s car when he went outside shortly after 3 p.m., both car and man barely visible in the thickening fog. The man, who didn’t introduce himself but who Mickey remembered was called Jackie, had made it clear to Mickey that he didn’t approve of him bothering Parker, and if Mickey continued to do so he threatened to acquaint him with two gentlemen who were both bigger and less reasonable than he, Jackie, was, and who would fold Mickey into a packing crate, breaking limbs if they had to in order to make him fit, and then mail him to the darkest hole in Africa by the slowest and most circuitous route possible. When Mickey asked Jackie if Parker had put him up to this, Jackie had replied in the negative, but Mickey wasn’t sure whether to believe him. It didn’t matter, in the end. Mickey wasn’t above playing dirty himself. He called the Bear to make sure that Parker was still working, and when he was asked if he wanted to talk to him, Mickey said that it was okay, he’d drop by and see him in person.
As darkness settled on the city, and while the mist was still heavy on the land, Mickey drove out to Scarborough.
It was past 8 p.m. as Mickey moved through the fog toward the house on the hill. He knew that Parker would not return until one or two in the morning, and the house next door was dark. An old couple, the Johnsons, lived there, but they seemed to be away. What was it that they called people who left for Florida when the cold began to bite? Birds? No, ‘snowbirds,’ that was it.
Even if they were home, it wouldn’t have deterred him from what he was planning to do. It would just have meant a longer walk. With them gone, he could park his car close to the house and not have to get his feet cold and wet, or risk being asked by a curious cop what he happened to be doing walking down a marsh road in the winter darkness.
He had already driven by the subject’s house a couple of times in daylight, but he couldn’t take the chance of looking at it up close without the risk of being seen. Now that he wasn’t working as a PI any longer, Parker spent more of his time at home, but Mickey hadn’t been allowed the luxury of watching the house for long enough to establish his routines. That would come in time.
Mickey still entertained the possibility that he could wear down Parker’s defenses and receive at least a modicum of cooperation from him. Mickey was tenacious, in a quiet way. He knew that most people wanted to talk about their lives, even if they didn’t always realize it. They wanted a sympathetic ear, someone who would understand. Sometimes all it took was a cup of coffee, but he’d seen it take a bottle of bourbon too. They were the two extremes, and the rest of humanity, in Mickey’s experience, slotted into various points between.
Mickey Wallace had been a good reporter. He was genuinely interested in those whose stories
he wrote. He didn’t have to fake it. Human beings were just endlessly fascinating to him, and even the dullest had a story worth telling, however short, buried somewhere deep inside. But, in time, journalism began to weary him. He didn’t have the energy for it that he had once enjoyed, or the hunger to go chasing people day after day just for the stories that he uncovered to be forgotten before the weekend. He wanted to write something that would last. He thought about writing novels, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t read them, so why would he want to write them? Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.
No, what interested Mickey was good and evil. It always had, ever since he was a kid watching The Lone Ranger and The Virginian on TV. Even as a reporter, it was the crime stories to which he was most drawn. True, they were more likely to appear above the fold, and Mickey liked seeing his name as close to the masthead as possible, but he was also fascinated by the relationship between killers and their victims. There was an intimacy, a bond between a murderer and a victim. It seemed to Mickey that a little of the victim’s identity was transferred to the killer, passed on at the moment of death, retained deep within his soul. He also believed, somewhat more controversially, that the victims’ deaths were what gave meaning to their lives, what raised them from the anonymity of day-to-day ordinariness and bequeathed a kind of immortality on them, or as close to immortality as the temporary nature of public attention could allow. Mickey supposed that it wasn’t quite immortality, especially since the victims in question were dead, but it would do until he could think of a better word.
It was as a reporter that he had first come into indirect contact with Parker. He had been among the throng outside the little house in Brooklyn on the night that Parker’s wife and child were killed. He had reported on the case, the stories getting smaller and smaller, and falling deeper and deeper into the main body of the paper, as lead after lead dried up. Eventually, even Mickey gave up on the Parker killings, and put them on the back burner. He had heard rumors that the feds were looking at a possible serial-killer connection, but the price of that information was a promise that he would sit on it until the time was right.