and worried at him with their sheer randomness. But the basement was her hideaway, her refuge, and he was content to leave it to her. He tried not to disturb her when she was there because there was no way to tell how she might react. Once she’d flown at him in a rage, her nails headed straight for his eyes, but mostly she just tended to scream and scream, the sound of it bouncing back at him from the stone walls.
He needed to know where she was. He kept all the windows and the outer doors locked, although that was more to keep people out than to keep her inside, for he lived in fear of intrusion into his life. By now the girl showed no signs of wanting to leave him. He wondered if her hatred of him had become a kind of love, her need a channel that connected the two opposing emotions. She was almost like a daughter to him, a recalcitrant, difficult, demanding child, and he was the father because he had made her what she was.
He hadn’t seen much of her for the past two days. She’d hidden herself away when the detective came, as she always did when a stranger appeared. Earlier that same day, he’d caught a glimpse of her passing through the kitchen while he worked at his computer. He didn’t like the TV on when he was trying to concentrate. She’d learned that lesson quickly, and now she just stayed away from the living room until after five. The last time he had actually spoken to her was to tell her to go back to her TV shows on the evening following the detective’s visit.
He knocked on the basement door. There was no reply.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You down there?’
He opened the door and spoke to the darkness. She disliked sudden intrusions and unexpected noises.
‘You can watch anything you like now. I’ve finished my work for the day. I’ll sit with you, if you want me to.’
He could see the night light burning against the far wall. There was a small pile of books in the corner, still unread, and a stuffed animal that he’d bought for her at Treehouse Toys when he’d been doing some work down in Portland.
He advanced to the first step, still reluctant to trespass. Early on, before he’d come to understand her ways, and she his, she had tried to knock his feet out from under him when he entered the basement, and he had barely managed to hold on to the rail and prevent himself from breaking his neck. A huge splinter had pierced his palm, and even though he’d managed to get the bulk of it out, some shards had penetrated deep into his flesh and had begun to fester, so that he’d been forced to see a doctor and have them removed under local anesthetic. After that he’d locked the basement door, and taken away the lead for the TV. Depriving her of TV was the worst punishment that he could inflict upon her, and always led to a battle of wills between them. He had learned to lock the lead in his safe because she would find it otherwise, but those periods when the TV was no longer hers to control were the worst between them. In retaliation, she would do her best to irritate him, tapping on the wall at night while he tried to sleep, or rearranging his papers so that he lost track of his accounts, or spilling milk in the fridge while he was out and then turning the power off so that he had to empty the contents and wash it out to remove the sour stink. Finally, a compromise would be reached, and TV rights would be restored, but the conflict always took its toll on both of them and they had each learned that it was better to avoid such confrontations to begin with.
But relations between them were not always so hostile. Sometimes, especially on cold nights when the old house creaked and moaned, and the wind found the gaps in the boards and under the doors, and branches cracked beneath the weight of snow and ice, she would climb into his bed unbidden, and press herself against him, stealing his warmth, like a dream made real.
He descended farther, crouching so that the entire basement was visible to him, and felt panic, and fear, and loss.
But, most of all, he felt a kind of relief.
She was gone.
19
It was a cold, damp night at the end of a long, dismal day. I had been called back by the defense in the Denny Kraus case, and then had to wait around for hours close to the courthouse on Federal Street as Denny’s attorney tried to maintain his composure while dealing with a prosecutor who was determined to prove that Denny was mentally competent to face trial, and with whom Denny repeatedly agreed. The attorney was young, and court- appointed, and he should have put pressure on Denny to keep his mouth shut, although it wasn’t entirely his fault. The state wanted Denny to go down for murder, for reasons that I couldn’t grasp but were probably linked to politics, and ambition, and someone seeking to make the figures look good at the end of the year. A more battle- hardened attorney than Denny’s would have found a way to negotiate a compromise deal that satisfied everyone, except possibly Denny, but then what Denny wanted didn’t really matter. He probably should have thought harder about his plans for the future before he killed a man over a dog.
While I was kicking my heels waiting for my moment of glory in the witness box, I continued delving into the personal details of those on Randall Haight’s list of new clients and recent arrivals in Pastor’s Bay, but I was starting to believe that it was a dead end. I had to proceed on the basis that it wasn’t, but I couldn’t shake my gut feeling that there was nothing hidden behind those names, nothing useful to be found. It raised the possibility that the person who was tormenting Randall Haight might have been lying dormant for a long time, waiting for the right opportunity to use Haight’s past against him. If that was the case, I was faced with the almost impossible task of investigating every adult who had crossed Randall Haight’s path. Equally, though, someone from Randall’s past might have spotted him on the streets of Belfast, or Portland, or Augusta, or while passing through Pastor’s Bay itself, then discovered his address and proceeded to target him without ever having exchanged even a word with him.
But I had reached one conclusion at least: If by the following morning I hadn’t heard confirmation from Aimee that Haight was prepared to be interviewed by the police, I was going to call Gordon Walsh myself and suggest that he talk to Haight, even at the risk of poisoning my relationship with Aimee and potentially leaving myself open to charges and imprisonment for breach of client confidentiality. The final push had been provided by a realization that should have come to me the moment Haight showed me the photographs of naked children. Someone who was in possession of sexually suggestive photos of underage kids might well be capable of taking a child to satisfy his urges. It was the connection I needed to silence my conscience about any betrayal of Aimee or Haight that I might have to commit.
My name was called shortly after three p.m., but my period under cross-examination could have been measured in nanoseconds. Even the judge seemed to be losing the will to live after a day of questioning that had merely confirmed what everybody already knew: Denny Kraus was crazy, because in his situation only a lunatic would deny that he was crazy.
After I was done in court, I headed up to Nosh on Congress and shot the breeze for a while with Matt, one of the partners in the place. If someone had told me a couple of years ago that Portland needed another bar selling burgers, I’d have laughed in his face, and you wouldn’t have heard me above all the other people who were laughing too. Then Nosh opened and folk started tasting the burgers, and a general agreement was reached that, yes, maybe we had needed just one more bar selling burgers, as long as the food was this good. And because I felt that I owed it to myself after the day I’d had, I ate some bacon-dusted fries too, and pushed the boat out by sipping a Clown Shoes brown ale, and gradually the day began not to seem so bad after all.
The channels through the Scarborough salt marshes appeared only as swaths of a deeper blackness against the tall grass as I drove home, like lengths of dark ribbon dropped from the sky. I turned into my driveway, the headlamps reflecting on the windows of the empty house. I entered through the back door leading into the kitchen, and turned on the light.
The moisture had beaded on the main window that faced north, and someone had written on the glass with a finger, cutting long careful lines through the water. The words were written in a child’s hand, a hand with which I was familiar, for it had communicated with me once before in attic dust. It had been so long. I thought that they were gone, but how could they ever truly be gone? Now one of them had returned, the echo of my dead daughter, and where she went so too walked her mother, a stranger, more nebulous figure. If my daughter was a small, cold star, then her mother was the night sky against which she lay.
The words on the glass read:
