I got on my knees, searched until I saw a glint like gray metal. A nail head, I thought; but when I tried to pick it up, there was nothing there.
What the hell?
I pointed the flashlight at the ground. The reflected light was gone.
But when I looked at my finger, I saw a grayish smudge. Not dirt, more like the residue left when you kill a silverfish, greasy and dark. I sniffed my finger: no smell. I wiped my hand on my jeans, stood, and trained the flashlight on the tree.
The jumble of sticks was about ten feet above me, caught in the crotch of two large branches that splayed into smaller limbs, their stiff needles shaking in the wind. The tree held other things as well. A torn bag, hanks of dead grass.
I walked toward it. When I stepped outside the circle of turtle shells, something cracked beneath my boot. I bent to pick it up.
An antler, mottled white, thin and slightly curved, with tiny ridges along one edge where it had been gnawed by an animal. I ran my finger along it, felt hardened shreds of tissue like splinters of wood, then held it to the flashlight.
My mouth went dry. I’d spent enough hours thirty years ago, photographing myself with a lifesize model of a human skeleton to know this wasn’t an antler.
It was a human rib.
I turned it to clearly see the crosshatch of teethmarks at one end, panicked and flung it into the darkness. I spat on my fingers and rubbed them frantically on my jeans. Then, clutching the boat hook, I walked the last few steps to the pine tree and slowly raised my flashlight until, at last, I saw what was there.
A body. What remained of it, anyway, caught in the crook of the branches like a burst trash bag. A T-shirt and ragged jeans still clung to it, the shirt dangling so I could see the faded Nike wing emblazoned on the chest. What I had taken for sticks was a tangled mass of bones, blotched with dried shreds of sinew. Part of the ribcage protruded through the T-shirt. What I had taken for dead grass was black hair, matted with leaves and hanging from something that resembled a deflated soccer ball.
I backed away, my boots sliding on slick rock and moss.
I’d just seen Martin Graves.
25
I stumbled back to the road. I’d seen bodies before—I’d sought them out, back in the day—but nothing like this.
No animal could have dragged that body into the crotch of a tree. Denny Ahearn had—but why?
The wind whipped up from the sea, carrying gusts of rain. I took a few deep breaths then swallowed, tasting salt and blood. I spat, leaned on the boat hook and willed the throbbing in my head to stop. A few hundred yards below me, buildings yawned black in the gathering dusk—all save that one house with its malign yellow windows. I thought of what I’d just seen in the tree, and of the other tangled mass by the first quarry’s edge.
Yellow light pulsed. Someone whispered my name.
Cass, Cass.
It never ends. It’s always 4 am. beneath a broken streetlamp. And afterward every step, every drink, every person whispers the same thing: You didn’t fight.
Until now.
I swallowed some whiskey and gulped another Adderall, hefted the boat hook, and started toward the house.
Denny’s compound consisted of several outbuildings scattered between stunted trees. A few buildings had been repaired with plywood or driftwood. Others were little more than cellar holes patched with drywall and plastic sheeting, roofed with sheets of blue Styrofoam.
One building, an old barn, had been more carefully renovated. Its doors were open. I shone the flashlight inside and saw a small tractor and stacks of plastic storage containers, a chainsaw.
I moved on. The ground was slippery. There was rubble everywhere. Granite obelisks and broken columns, an arm as tall as a man. Cemetery figures of angels and grieving women. On each the same symbol had been painted: two concentric circles with a dot in the center.
I realized then what I had seen on the standing stone by Denny’s abandoned bus.
Not a bullseye: an eye. And every single one held a blotched green star.
Sleet rattled against the outbuildings. I crouched alongside a low shed with a wire run. A gleam showed through windows covered with blue tarps, and I could hear the low murmur of birds roosting inside. A henhouse.
The main house was about fifty feet away. At the back stretched a small, windowless addition, its shingles raw and unstained. I recalled what Toby had said about building a darkroom. There were solar panels on the roof, and a jerry-rigged water system—plastic tubing, oil drums, a large metal holding tank. I headed toward the rear of the house.
As I drew close I could hear music. Woodsmoke wafted through the icy rain. I approached one darkened window and then the next, and tried to peer inside.
It was hopeless. Sheets of plastic opaque with grime had been nailed across each window. Everything stank of urine and that now-familiar reek of musk and fish. At the back of the house I found a liquid propane tank and a woodshed. I continued to the other side.
Windows boarded up with plywood; flapping bits of plastic. Something crunched beneath my boots—a pile of eggshells. I took a few more steps and halted by a big wooden box, about five feet tall, no lid. I shone the flashlight inside and shaded my eyes, dazzled. It was filled with splintered plate glass.
I killed the flashlight and headed for the front of the house. I clutched the boat hook as tightly as I could, and edged toward the steps.
A figure stood in a pool of light by the open door.
“Hello,” he whispered.
He was a good six inches taller than me, broad shouldered and muscular, his face gaunt, clean shaven. He wore a brown tweed jacket with frayed sleeves, wool pants tucked into gumboots, a white cotton shirt pocked with tiny holes. His white hair hung in two long, tight braids to his chest. Around his neck was a heavy silver disk inlaid with turquoise and threaded on a leather thong.
He said, “Are you looking for someone?”
He had the face of an aging WASP ecstatic, with high cheekbones and deepset eyes, wide mouth, sharp nose. I felt sucker punched, not just by his beauty but by the sudden dreamlike sense that I knew him, that this had happened already and something—drugs, drink, my own slow spin into bad craziness—had kept me from seeing the obvious.
Then he lifted his head, and I knew.
He had eyes the color of dark topaz. In the left one, just below the iris, was a spray of green pigment like a tiny star.
Stephen Haselton wasn’t Gryffin’s father. Denny Ahearn was.
No one had bothered to tell me. And of course I had never asked.
“I—yeah,” I stammered. “I’m, uh—are you Denny? I’m a friend of Toby Barrett’s.”
“Toby.” He repeated the name in a whisper; a cultivated voice, less Maine than Boston Brahmin. His big hands shook in a slight palsy as he looked past me into the rain. “Is Toby here?”
“He’s—he’s on his way. He had to do something at Lucien’s house.” I remembered Aphrodite’s death, and nausea gave way to a rush of adrenaline. “We—I—have a message for you.”
“Come in out of the rain.” He held up a hand. “But you must leave your staff outside.”
He pointed at the boat hook. I hesitated, then leaned it beside the door.
“You’re a friend of Toby’s?”
I nodded. He bent over a stack of firewood beside the door, picked up three enormous logs as though they were made of Styrofoam.
“I thought he closed up the house a few weeks ago,” he said and straightened. “I wasn’t expecting him.” He stared at me, licked his lips, then whispered, “And you are…?”