The Prettiest Feathers (31 page)

I turned from the coal bin and walked out to the end of the ell. There was a small stream that flowed in under one side of the foundation, carved its way through the dirt floor, and disappeared. Corrigan had built a low stone wall to keep the water on its course when snow melt swelled the runoff in the spring.

Your sister Sarah told Lane how much you loved that book on mythology, especially the story about the man who could fly. Did you read about Icarus—about his wings of wax melting when he flew too near the sun? He fell into the Aegean Sea. Was this your sea, lad? This pissy little river?

I turned in the direction of a scratching noise, and watched a large water rat make his way along the sill of the house. Another set piece to amplify the horror. But no one could have designed this. Not even Stephen King. It was a natural.

I walked back through the cellar, up the stairs, and out into the light of the day. I hadn’t passed any other houses on
my way in, so I walked farther up the hill—perhaps 150 yards—until I found the nearest neighbor.

A young man wearing hunting garb and holding a hamburger in his hand answered my knock.

“I was looking at the house just down the hill there,” I said.

“Corrigan’s?”

“I guess. Do you know if it’s for sale?”

He laughed. “Town took it for taxes years ago. Been for sale for as long as I can remember. The bulkhead isn’t locked on it. You can get inside if you want. But what would you want with it anyway?”

“It’s a nice piece of land,” I said.

“Ledge. Oh, it’s maybe ten acres, but it’s mostly ledge. You’d live there?”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “Only after it had a little work done on it.”

“Check with the town clerk.” he said. “She’s also the tax collector. I think they wanted thirty thousand for it, but that was a few years back.”

“Do you know anything about what happened to the place?”

“She could tell you that, too. The Corrigans died, I know that. But they had grown kids. Maybe they just didn’t want the place. I don’t know.”

I started to turn away, then thought of one last question. “Do you know if anyone else has looked at the place recently?”

He chewed his burger, thoughtful for a moment. “There was another guy. My brother seen him. I didn’t. He said the guy went up there and looked around, came back out, and left. Maybe you’ll have a bidding war on that old piece of shit.”

I thanked him and made my way back to the car.

After a stop at the town hall—where I obtained an application to bid on the property, plus a rough copy of a surveyor’s map
of the land—I retraced the route to the interstate and continued north. I had no idea where Wolf would be, but it had to be within striking distance of the house. The marks on the outside of the coal bin told me that his business there wasn’t finished.

I headed for White River Junction because it offered several motels, as well as highway access to a wide area of the Twin State Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire. The postmark on that package Sinclair received meant little. White River was a central office, serving dozens of towns and villages. But it was a place to begin.

W
hen I got back from Florida, I went into hiding at Fuzzy’s apartment. My place was a crime scene. Robert’s wasn’t safe. And, until I knew what Pop had going, I had no intention of dealing with Hanson.

Fuzzy had been out to Tranquil Acres and said that a minor miracle had taken place. “Even Bobby’s paranoia is improving,” he said. “He changed his mind about them having microphones in the walls.”

I asked Fuzzy if I should tell Robert about Sheila.

“No way. Sobriety’s a fragile thing.”

It sounded funny hearing a word like “fragile” come out of Fuzzy’s mouth.

“I heard that at an AA meeting once,” he said. “He’d try to climb over Lymann to get out of that place. That’d be no help for you, and bad for him. I just finished chilling him out over a bunch of nightmares he was having.”

I had heard all about those from Lymann. He called to tell me to stay out of Robert’s dreams because I was getting killed in them.

“So the Wolf lives in the wilderness, huh?” Fuzzy asked.

“You ever been to Vermont, Fuzzy?”

“Farthest north I ever got was Yonkers.”

I was comfortable-sitting with Fuzzy in his kitchen, drinking coffee and talking. I was also thinking about how my two years in the city had turned into four, and how keeping the peace had metamorphosed into coping with a serial killer.

On the flight back from Florida, I had watched a little girl in the seat next to me. She was struggling with one of those brain teaser games—the kind where you have to jump plastic pegs over each other and end up with a single peg in the middle. After about an hour of diligent work but no results, she leaned over and said, “My name is Shawna. Are you smart?”

“My name is Lane,” I said. “Maybe if we work on that puzzle together, we can do it.”

It’s a simple concept, really, but one that you can see only when you step back from it. Each move must set up another, and all action must be toward the center. For a half hour, I had a great time and Shawna mastered the game. That was when I realized just how tired I was of having my life controlled by a madman.

Those sentiments echoed words I’d heard my mother say to my father many times. He would become obsessed with a murder, and Mom would ask him,
beg
him to leave it alone, set it aside for an hour, and come with her to the park, or the café on the corner, or even just the backyard.

He couldn’t do it. And I had always sided with him, thinking that he was in touch with the true essence of life, the only work that really mattered. I had always believed that he was the one who was making a difference in the world, but what I failed to see was that Mom was making a different world. She was the one in control, taming her environment, staying sane—while Pop was drawn ever deeper into the twisted, labyrinthine workings of society’s sickest minds. And I had followed him.

Mine was a love-hate relationship with Homicide. I hated the depravity of it, but loved the feeling of what Robert called “correcting God’s mistakes”—getting the bad guys off the street.

Fuzzy was refilling my cup. “For about a day there, I thought I was going to put police work behind me and move on,” I told him. “I was thinking I’d apply to grad school. Maybe go into medicine.”

“Hey, Hanson had to suspend you,” Fuzzy said.

“I know that.”

My thoughts of becoming a doctor hadn’t lasted very long. The bottom line for Pop had always been that the system wasn’t equipped to deal with strangers killing strangers. That fact had always been more important to my father than the practice of his brand of medicine—psychiatry. It was for me, too.

“This guy has been dictating where I live, whether I can do my job, whether I get any sleep at night. I know what it feels like to be isolated, to be someone’s target. When I made the switch to plainclothes, I already felt like I couldn’t handle Homicide. The politics. Being young and a woman in the last citadel of the good ol’ boys.”

“Listen,” Fuzzy said. “You know, I once did a stint in Investigations. That’s what they called it back then.”

“You were a detective?”

“Lasted two weeks. I had everything going for me. Talk about being a good ol’ boy. Shit. The poker games, the booze. I had a patent on ’em. But I didn’t have the smarts, Lane. And I didn’t have the guts. The first scene I go to, the lead tells me we got four dead. I count three. ‘Where’s four?’ I ask him. ‘In there,’ he says. I thought it was a doll stuffed down behind the radiator, this one tiny foot sticking up in the air. The kid was three years old. That’s all the life she got see.”

Fuzzy shrugged. “I put the uniform back on. Homicide’s a different world. You got the smarts, Lane. And you got the
guts. You’re gonna make a damn fine detective. But this may not be the case to cut your teeth on.”

“I felt that way before, Fuzzy,” I told him. “But this case doesn’t seem so convoluted anymore. I can put a face on the madman. I can tell you most of his life history and a lot of the reasons he chose to become what he is. And I don’t have any choice. If I don’t get him, he gets me.”

T
he motel I found was a bit fancier than a fellow like me requires, but all the less expensive housing had been taken by hunters from down country. They didn’t have the luxury of hunting camps, so they filled the motels just vacated by the foliage crowds.

What made the front page here wouldn’t make it into any city newspaper I knew of.
SCHOOL BOARD REFUSES TO CHANGE BUS ROUTE. CHURCH FUNDRAISER EXCEEDS GOAL. TRUCK FIRE ON INTERSTATE
. Life in the slow lane.

The letters to the editor ran three to one in favor of the right to life and the right to own guns (not necessarily the right to take life away, I assumed, but couldn’t be sure). There was a heated letter from a resident of Thetford defending Harry Truman’s use of the atomic bomb. Takes a long time to get things settled in northern New England.

Maybe it was the contrast—the mountains and forests of that region versus the tenements and broken street lights of the cities to the south—but I found myself thinking about
the Roxbury section of Boston, the place where I grew up. The building we lived in was a three-story walk-up. Although even then Roxbury was predominantly black, everyone was poor, and the overwhelming poverty seemed to transcend the issue of race.

I sat back in the motel chair, raised my bare feet to the table, and allowed my mind to drift. It’s something I’ve done for years—this wandering in my own mind. Whether I’m relaxing, or seeking some avenue into a perplexing problem concerning the logistics of murder, the road always begins within myself.

I could see a young kid, years earlier. He was across a vacant lot from me, playing with a kite. I was about seven years old.

The kid with the kite took flight. The blue-and-black paper bat soared in an arc up over the vacant lot. My sister moved away toward the wall of wildflowers and weeds, clapping her hands. And the kid with the kite was running toward me—crazed, it seemed, trying to look up at the sky and run at the same time. So I picked up a rock.

We were the last white family on the street in Roxbury. I spent hours curled into a corner of the first-floor landing, watching the people pass up and down the stairs. It was a way to pass the time. It was a way to avoid the violence that went on inside our apartment on the third floor. One time a man went up the stairs and jumped off the roof.

Years later—in my teens, perhaps—I asked my mother if she remembered the man who killed himself.

“No,” she said.

“Do you remember sirens?”

“No.”

“Did I dream it?”

“What?”

“What I just said.”

“No.”

“Then, how do I know?”

“You shouldn’t.”

“But I do.”

“Ask your father.”

“Was he there?”

“No. He was watching Eddie Fisher.”

I remember feeling a headache coming on.

“What about when I hit the kid with the rock?” I asked.

“That you dreamed,” she said.

But I remember searching the world for my sister’s eyes. She had turned away. There was no greater terror than not being able to find my sister’s eyes. There was the kid with his bat kite running like a madman right at me.

I thought it was real. My mother said it was a dream. My sister doesn’t remember. But the rock hit its mark and drew blood, and the whole world fell silent.

When I was in college, I used to dream that I was on a train going faster and faster, constantly accelerating on a set of straight tracks. Other times it was as if everything slowed down, like watching life in slow motion.

The man who jumped off the roof had a name: Cedric. I called him “the ash man” because the only times I ever saw him were when he was taking the ashes from his coal stove down to the barrel in the backyard.

“All he ever does is go up and down the stairs with his buckets of ashes,” I told my mother.

“That’s all you ever see him do,” she said.

“What else does he do?”