The White Road-CP-4 (7 page)

With the mention of his name, I recalled some details of the case. Earl Larousse was just about the biggest industrialist from the Carolinas to the Mississippi; he owned tobacco plantations, oil wells, mining operations, factories. He even owned most of Grace Falls, the town in which Elliot had grown up, except you didn’t read about Earl Larousse in the society pages or the business sections, or see him standing beside presidential candidates or dullard congressmen. He employed PR companies to keep his name out of the public domain and to stonewall journalists and anybody else who tried to poke around in his affairs. Earl Larousse liked his privacy, and he was prepared to pay a lot of money to protect it, but the death of his daughter had thrust his family unwillingly into the limelight. His wife had died a few years back, and he had a son, Earl Jr., older than Marianne by a couple of years, but none of the surviving members of the Larousse clan had made any public comment on the death of Marianne or the impending trial of her killer. Now Elliot Norton was defending the man accused of raping and murdering Earl Larousse’s daughter, and that was a course of action likely to make him the second most unpopular person in the state of South Carolina, after his client. Anybody drawn into the maelstrom surrounding the case was going to suffer; there was no question about it. Even if Earl himself didn’t decide to take the law into his own hands there were plenty of other people who would because Earl was one of their own, because he paid their wages, and because maybe Earl would smile upon whoever did him the favor of punishing the man he believed had killed his little girl.

“I’m sorry, Elliot,” I said. “This isn’t something I want to get involved with right now.”

There was silence at the other end of the line.

“I’m desperate, Charlie,” he said at last, and I could hear it in his voice: the tiredness, the fear, the frustration. “My secretary is quitting at the end of the week because she doesn’t approve of my client list and pretty soon I’ll have to drive to Georgia to buy food because nobody around here will sell me jackshit.” His voice rose. “So don’t fucking tell me that this is something you don’t want to get involved with like you’re running for fucking Congress or something, because my house and maybe my life are on the line and…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. After all, what more was there to say?

I heard him exhale a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“It’s okay,” I replied, but it wasn’t, not for him and not for me.

“I hear you’re about to become a father,” he said. “That’s good, after all that’s happened. I was you, maybe I’d stay up there in Maine too and forget that some asshole called you up out of the blue to join in his crusade. Yeah, I think that would be what I’d do, if I was you. You take care now, Charlie Parker. Look after that little lady.”

“I will.”

“Yeah.”

Then he hung up. I tossed the phone on one of the chairs and dragged my hands over my face. The dog now lay curled at my feet, his bone clasped between his front paws as he tugged at it with his sharp teeth. The sun still shone on the marsh and birds still moved slowly on the waters, calling to one another as they glided between the cattails, but now the transient, fragile nature of what I was witnessing seemed to weigh heavily upon me. I found myself looking toward the ruined shack where the garter snakes lay, waiting for rodents and small birds to stumble into their path. You could walk away from them, pretend to yourself that they weren’t doing you any harm and that you had no cause to go interfering with them. If you were right, then you might never have to face them again, or maybe creatures bigger and stronger than they would do you a favor and deal with them for you.

But, someday, you might go back to that cabin and lift up those same floorboards, and where once there were a dozen snakes there would now be hundreds and no collection of old boards and decaying timbers would be enough to contain them. Because ignoring them or forgetting them doesn’t make them go away.

It just makes it easier for them to breed.

That afternoon, I left Rachel working in her office and headed into Portland. My trainers and sweats were in the trunk of the car, and I had intended to go into One City Center and do a couple of circuits, but instead I ended up walking the streets, browsing in Carlson & Turner’s antiquarian bookstore up on Congress Street and Bullmoose Music down in the Old Port. I picked up the new Pinetop Seven album, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, a copy of Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker, and Leisure and Other Songs by a group called Spokane, because they were led by Rick Alverson, who used to head up Drunk and who made the kind of music you wanted to listen to when old friends let you down or you caught a glimpse of a former lover on a city street, her fingers entwined with those of another, looking at him in a way that reminded you of how she had once looked at you. There were still crowds of tourists around, the last of the summer wave. Soon the leaves would start to turn in earnest and then the next wave would arrive to watch the trees burn like fire as far north as the Canadian border. I was angry with Elliot and more angry with myself. It sounded like a difficult case but difficult cases were part of the job. If I sat around waiting for easy ones, then I’d starve or go crazy. Two years ago, I’d have headed down to South Carolina to help him out without a second thought, but now I had Rachel and I was about to become a father again. I had been given a second chance, and I didn’t want to endanger it in any way.

I found myself back at my car. This time, I took my kit from the trunk and spent an hour pushing myself as hard as I had ever pushed myself in the gym, working until my muscles burned and I had to sit on a bench with my head down before the worst of the nausea had passed. But I still felt ill as I drove back to Scarborough, and the sweat that dripped from my face was the sweat of the sickbed.

Rachel and I didn’t talk properly about the call until dinner that evening. We had been together as a couple for about nineteen months, although we had only been living under the same roof for less than two. There were those who looked at me differently now, as if wondering how a man who had lost his wife and daughter under such terrible circumstances less than three years before could bring himself to begin again, could create another child and attempt to find a place for it in a world that had spawned a killer capable of tearing a daughter and her mother apart. But if I had not tried, if I had not reached out to another person and made some small, halting connection to her in the hope that it might one day bring us closer together, then the Traveling Man, the creature that had taken them away from me, would have won. I could not change the fact that we had all suffered at his hands, but I refused to be his victim for the rest of my life. And this woman was, in her quiet way, extraordinary. She had seen in me something worthy of love, of salvation, and had set about recovering that thing from the deep place to which it had retreated in order to protect itself from further harm. She was not so naive as to believe that she could save me: rather, she made me want to save myself.

Rachel had been shocked when she discovered that she was pregnant. We both were, a little, in the beginning, but it seemed even then that there was a rightness to it, an appropriateness, that allowed us to face our new future with a kind of quiet confidence. It sometimes felt like the decision to have a child had been made for us by some higher power, and all we could do now was hang on and enjoy the ride. Well, maybe Rachel wouldn’t have used the word “enjoy”: after all, it was she who had felt a strange heaviness to all her actions from the moment the test had proved positive; she who stared at her figure in alarm as she began to put on weight in strange places; she whom I found crying at the kitchen table in the dead of one August night, overcome by feelings of dread and sadness and exhaustion; she who threw up every morning with all the certainty of sunrise; and she who would sit, her hand upon her belly, listening to the spaces between her heartbeats with both fear and wonder, as if she could hear the little bundle of cells slowly growing within her. The first trimester had been especially difficult for her. Now, in her second, she had found new reserves of energy initiated for her by the child’s first kicks, by the confirmation that what lay inside her was no longer potential but had become actual. While I watched her quietly, Rachel tore into a piece of beef so rare she had to hold it down with her fork to keep it from making a break for the door. Beside it, potatoes and carrots and zucchini lay heaped in little mountains.

“Why aren’t you eating?” she asked, when she came up briefly for air. I curled my arm protectively around my plate. “Back,” I said. “Bad dog.”

To my left, Walt’s head spun toward me, a brief flash of confusion visible in his eyes. “Not you,”

I reassured him, and his tail wagged.

Rachel finished chewing, then jabbed her momentarily empty fork at me. “It was that call today. Am I right?”

I nodded and toyed with my food, then told her Elliot’s story. “He’s in trouble,” I concluded.

“And anyone who sides with him against Earl Larousse is going to be in trouble too.”

“Have you ever met Larousse?”

“No. The only reason I know about him is because Elliot has told me things in the past.”

“Bad things?”

“Nothing worse than you’d expect from a man with more money than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people in the state: intimidation, bribery, crooked land deals, brushes with the EPA over polluted rivers and poisoned fields, the usual stuff. Throw a stone in Washington when Congress is in session and you’ll hit apologists for any one of a hundred people like him. But that doesn’t make the loss of his daughter any less painful for him.”

An image of Irv Blythe flashed briefly in my mind. I swatted the thought away like a fly.

“And Norton is certain that his client didn’t kill her?”

“Seems that way. After all, he took over the case from the original lawyer and then stood bail for the guy, and Elliot isn’t the kind of man who risks his money or his reputation on a losing prospect. Then again, a black man accused of the murder of a rich white girl could be at risk among the general population, assuming somebody got it into his head to make a name for himself with the grieving family. According to Elliot, he either bailed his client or he buried him. Those were the options.”

“When is the trial?”

“Soon.” I had gone through the newspaper reports of the murder on the Internet, and it was clear that the case had been fast-tracked from the beginning. Marianne Larousse had been dead for only a few months, but the case would be tried early in the new year. The law didn’t like to keep people like Earl Larousse waiting.

We stared at each other across the table.

“We don’t need the money,” said Rachel. “Not that badly.”

“I know.”

“And you don’t want to go down there.”

“No, I sure don’t.”

“Well, then.”

“Well, then.”

“Eat your dinner, before I do.”

I did as I was told. I even tasted some of it.

It tasted like ash.

After dinner, we drove out to Len Libby’s on Route 1 and sat on a bench outside to eat our ice cream. Len Libby’s used to be on Spurwink Road, on the way to Higgins Beach, with tables inside where people sat and shot the breeze. It had moved out to its new location, on the highway, a few years back, and while the ice cream was still good, eating it while looking out at four lanes of traffic wasn’t quite the same. Instead, there was now a life-size chocolate moose beside the ice cream counter, which probably counted as some form of progress. Rachel and I didn’t speak. The sun set behind us, our shadows growing longer before us, stretching away ahead of us like our hopes and fears for the future.

“You see the paper today?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t get a chance.”

She picked up her bag and rummaged through it until she found the piece she had kept from the Press Herald, then handed it to me. “I don’t know why I tore it out,” she said. “I knew you’d have to see it sometime, but part of me didn’t want you to have to read about him again. I’m tired of seeing his name.”

I unfolded the paper.

Thomaston—The Rev. Aaron Faulkner will remain at Thomaston State Prison until his trial, a Department of Corrections spokesman said yesterday. Faulkner, indicted earlier this year on charges of conspiracy and murder, was transferred to Thomaston from the state Supermax facility a month ago, following what appeared to be a failed suicide attempt. Faulkner was arrested in Lubec in May of this year following a confrontation with Scarboroughbased private detective Charlie Parker, during which two people, a male calling himself Elias Pudd and an unnamed female, were killed. DNA tests revealed that the dead man was in fact Faulkner’s son, Leonard. The woman was identified as Muriel Faulkner, the preacher’s daughter. Faulkner was formally indicted in May for the murders of the Aroostook Baptists, the religious group headed by the preacher that disappeared from its settlement at Eagle Lake in January 1964, and conspiracy to murder at least four other named individuals, among them industrialist Jack Mercier.

The remains of the Aroostook Baptists were uncovered close by Eagle Lake April last. Officials in Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts may also be examining unsolved cases in which Faulkner and his family were allegedly involved, although no attempt has yet been made to charge Faulkner outside Maine.

According to sources within the Maine attorney general’s office, both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI are also examining Faulkner’s case, with a view of trying him on federal charges.

Faulkner’s attorney, James Grimes, told reporters yesterday he remained concerned for the health and well-being of his client and he was considering appealing to the State Supreme Court following the decision of a Washington County Superior Court to refuse bail. Faulkner has said he is innocent of all charges and was kept a virtual prisoner by his family for almost forty years. Meanwhile, the consultant entomologist employed by investigators to catalogue the collection of insects and spiders found at the Lubec compound occupied by Faulkner and his two children told the Press Herald yesterday that he had almost completed his work. According to a state police spokesman, the collection is believed to have been assembled by Leonard Faulkner, alias “Elias Pudd,” over many years.