The Wolf in Winter (17 page)

“So how did you find 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 fingernails 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 they’re compatible with the town. Houses aren’t sold to those who
weren’t born in Prosperous, or 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, 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 jellyfish. 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 jellyfish, 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 office, to support charities, to help out with donations to worthwhile causes when the state can’t or won’t. After a couple of generations, it gets so that people forget that these are creatures of Prosperous, and whatever they do aims to benefit Prosperous first and foremost. It’s in their nature, from way back when they first 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 fly 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 infiltrators. 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.”

This 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 jellyfish and parasites and bloodlines made him sound like a paranoid obsessive. Perhaps he was. Euclid guessed 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 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.

“Wackjobs? 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 four hundred dollars and went up to forty thousand. The one that Euclid Danes used had a lot of gold on it.

“I look like the crazy old coot who lives in a run-down house with more dogs than bugs and a sister who can only cook meat loaf,” 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 influence. 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 find that I’ve tied so much legal ribbon around my land that humanity itself will be extinct before they find 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 lowered his head 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 be a matter of knocking down some trees.”

Euclid took a small flashlight from his pocket and shined 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 atavastic 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 flashlight.

“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 meat loaf 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 on my scalp, as though bugs were crawling through my hair.

Euclid called back a final 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 first 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 flashlights had picked out the big paw prints on the scattered earth, and the broken bones, and the teeth marks on 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 find 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 collected of the girl into more of the plastic sheeting, dump it in the car, and refill 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 . . .

Morland wanted to punch Harry. He wanted to kill him. It was the Dixons’ fault, all of it. Even if Harry and Erin located a suitable girl, Morland would find a way to make them pay. Hell, if Erin herself
wasn’t so fucking old and worn they could have used her. But no, the town didn’t feed on its own. It never had. Those from within who transgressed had always been dealt with in a different way. There were rules.

They taped up the plastic, forming three packages of body parts. After that they drove north for an hour, far beyond Prosperous, and reburied what was left of the girl. The stench of her stayed with them both all the way to town. Later, back in their own homes, both men scrubbed and showered, but still they could smell her.

Erin Dixon knocked at the bathroom door fifteen minutes after the shower had stopped running, and her husband had still not emerged. Bryan Joblin had fallen asleep in the armchair by the fireplace. She had thought about killing him. She was thinking about killing a lot lately.

“Harry?” she called. “Are you okay?”

From inside the bathroom she heard the sound of weeping. She tried the door. It was unlocked.

Her husband was sitting on the edge of the tub, a towel wrapped around his waist and his face buried in his hands. She sat beside him and held him to her.

“Can you smell it?” he asked her.

She sniffed him, inhaling the scent of his hair and his skin. She ­detected only soap.

“You smell fine,” she said. “You want to tell me what happened?”

“No.”

She went to the bathroom doorway and listened. She could still hear the sound of Joblin snoring. She closed the door and returned to her husband, but she kept her voice to a whisper, just in case.

“Marie Nesbit called me earlier on my cell phone, while that asshole was snoring his head off,” she said.

Marie was Erin’s closest friend. She worked as a secretary at the Town Office, and was from one of the founding families, just like the
Dixons. Her husband, Art, was an alcoholic, but gentle and sad, for the most part, rather than violent. Erin had long provided her with a sympathetic ear.