George I found out there last night.”
Kitteridge said nothing, but met her gaze steadily.
“Okay,” she said. “Come on inside. I got a picture of George. You tell me if’n it’s the same man.”
Kitteridge climbed up onto the porch and followed Amelie into the shanty. Inside, though it barely seemed possible, the house was even more decrepit than outside. There was a tattered sofa covered with a worn blanket, and broken recliner. In one corner stood a splintering pine table and two more chairs. A wood stove filled another corner, and a makeshift counter had been built along the wall next to it. Through a door, he could see a second room, containing a bed frame on which lay a sagging mattress. There was no sign of a bathroom, and the police chief knew better than to ask about it. Here in the swamp there simply was no plumbing. Through an empty window frame he could see a lopsided outhouse, against which leaned a pile of traps. Well, at least he knew how George Coulton earned whatever money he made. Shaking his head at the poverty of the place, he turned around to find Amelie holding a picture. He studied it carefully, taking it out onto the porch to hold it in the sunlight.
It was a photograph of a couple, and the woman was clearly Amelie Coulton. The man next to her, a lean, gangling figure almost a foot taller than she, had the narrow face typical of the swamp, and empty eyes. His chin was covered with a stubble of beard, and a shotgun was cradled in the crook of his arm. His other arm was draped possessively over Amelie’s shoulder. Kitteridge flipped the picture over and read the scrawl on the other side: “Wedding day — me and George.” It was dated seven months earlier.
Kitteridge studied the picture again. Even allowing for the premature aging of the swamp rats, George Coulton couldn’t have been more than twenty-five when the photograph had been taken.
The man in the morgue had to have been at least eighty.
Silently, Kitteridge handed the picture back to Amelie, who had followed him out onto the porch. But as she reached out to take the snapshot from him, her face paled, her eyes widened, and her hand went to the great bulge in her belly. Unsteadily, she sank down onto the rocking chair.
“Oh, my,” she gasped as the sudden spasm of pain drained out of her. “I think mebbe it’s time.”
Kitteridge knew immediately what was happening. “Was that the first contraction?”
Amelie nodded. “I told George it was gettin’ close,” she said, her voice bitter.
Nice son of bitch, Kitteridge observed silently, thinking that if it had indeed been George Coulton whose body had been carried out of the swamp last night, at least he had found someone with a motive. But after talking to Amelie for a few minutes, he suspected killing Coulton would have been justified. When he spoke, though, he revealed none of his thoughts. “If you’re starting labor, we’d better get you into town. Do you have a suitcase packed?”
Amelie uttered a high-pitched, brittle laugh. “A suitcase? Ain’t nobody out here got one of them, an’ even if’n I did, ain’t nothin’ to put in it. All’s I got is—” Her words were choked off as another contraction seized her. When it had passed, she struggled to her feet.
Kitteridge helped her down the ladder to his boat and got her settled in the bow, then started the engine and cast off. But before he moved out into the channel, he glanced once more up at the house. “You sure you don’t need anything to take with you?” he asked.
Amelie laughed tightly again. “Like what? I ain’t even got a purse. Out here, nobody’s got nothin’. You’re born, you live awhile, and you die.” Her voice turned bitter. “Sometimes it seems like it’s the lucky ones that die young.”
As Kitteridge pulled away from the shanty, Amelie cocked her head and, for the first time, her eyes seemed to come alive. Kitteridge reflected that when George had married her — if, indeed, he really had — she must have been pretty.
Amelie laughed out loud, genuinely this time. “You’re lost, ain’t you?” she asked.
Kitteridge felt himself redden, but nodded. “How’d you know?”
“Easy,” she said. “You be goin’ the wrong way. Villejeune’s back there,” she went on, pointing past Kitteridge’s shoulder. “Not far, neither. Mebbe half a mile.” As he turned the boat around, she went on. “You take the main channel straight ahead, an’ cut through a little gap after the second island. Then bear left till you come to a big stump. After that, you can see the town.”
Ten minutes later they were there, and as they pulled up to the dock where Kitteridge had left his car, Amelie glanced nervously around, as if she expected someone to be waiting for her. Seeing him watching her, a veil dropped behind the young woman’s eyes and her lips twisted into a smile. “Thought he mighta been waitin’. He wanted me to birth the baby to home, but I won’t. Ain’t no way I’m lettin’ nothin’ happen to my baby.”
Kitteridge helped her out of the boat and led her up to the police car. Another contraction seized her just as she crept awkwardly into the passenger seat. “Take it easy,” he told her. “We’ll have you at the hospital in a couple of minutes.” Closing the door, he hurried around to the driver’s side, got in, and started the engine. As he pulled away from the dock, Amelie turned to him, her face almost pretty as she managed a small smile. “Leastwise, it warn’t a complete waste of time, you comin’ out to my house today.”
Kitteridge smiled wryly. “But I still don’t know who the body is.”
Amelie shrugged. “You know who it ain’t,” she said. Her lips compressed once more into the bitter smile that seemed almost second nature to her. “Frankly, I was kinda hopin’ mebbe it were George. Leastways, if he was dead, I guess it’d be my house, wouldn’t it?”
Kitteridge shrugged noncommittally, not wanting to get involved in whatever domestic arrangement George and Amelie had evolved. But after less than an hour with Amelie, he was all but certain that there were no documents anywhere registering a marriage between them. Which, he suspected, was just the way George Coulton wanted it. As long as Amelie pleased him, fine. But if she didn’t, he could simply throw her out.
He pulled into the clinic parking lot, helped Amelie inside, and got her admitted. Promising to look in on her later, he left her in Jolene Mayhew’s care and started back to his office.
Dead end, he thought, as he began filling out the forms necessary to dispose of the body in the morgue.
Fingerprints had already been made, and before the body was interred, pictures would be taken and a dental chart prepared. But by this evening, before it could begin to rot in the heat and humidity, the nameless body would be in the Villejeune cemetery, laid to rest in one of the anonymous crypts owned by the village for just such purposes as this.
And yet, even as he set the bureaucratic wheels in motion, Tim Kitteridge couldn’t shake the feeling that the corpse was, indeed, George Coulton’s.
Once more he remembered the words Marty Templar had spoken that morning, as he’d been giving his own report of what had happened in the swamp last night: “You want to hear something really weird, Chief? The woman who found the body — Amelie Coulton — was talking about someone called the Dark Man. Sounded like some kind of spook who came and took her husband away with him. Do you believe those people out there? They must be nuts!”
And he remembered the look on Amelie’s face when he himself had mentioned the Dark Man. Despite her claim not to remember what she’d said, he knew she was lying.
Lying, and frightened.
Amelie Coulton, he was sure, knew a lot more than she’d told him. But he was also sure, despite whatever motive she might have had, that she hadn’t killed the man from the swamp. Given the advanced state of her pregnancy, it seemed impossible for her to have attacked anyone.
No, someone else had killed him.
Someone he already suspected he would never find, given the refusal of all the swamp rats — except for Amelie — even to speak to him.
Yet Amelie knew something.
She had gone into the swamp alone, fully expecting to find the corpse of her husband. It wasn’t as if she’d simply stumbled upon the body and gone into a panic.
Making up his mind, he left his office and started back toward the hospital.
• • •
Amelie lay in bed, waiting for the next contraction to seize her. She was trying to keep track of how long it was between them, but she couldn’t concentrate.
She was still thinking about the police chief coming out to talk to her about George.
She knew he hadn’t quite believed her this afternoon — knew he suspected that the body she’d found last night was her husband, no matter what she’d said.
