“Why didn’t you?” I asked. Matheson looked like he could still handle himself.
“I’m not that kind of man,” he replied, but there was an unspoken “and” hanging in the air.
I waited. It came.
“He didn’t look like much: thin, dirty, unhealthy, but I got the feeling that he was stronger than he looked. I think that if I’d tried to lay a hand on him he would have hurt me. Not badly, maybe, but he would have enjoyed humiliating me. There was a malice to him, y’know? This all probably sounds cockeyed to you, but once my anger started to die down I began to get worried. Scared, even.”
I told him it didn’t sound cockeyed at all, that I had met men like that. They wanted you to descend to their level, and once you were down there they would try to finish you. If you were going to take them on, then you had to be prepared to endure some pain, and to inflict it back in spades.
Matheson continued: “So I told him that even if what he said was true, he should call up the Farmers’ Mutual Bank and ask them about it. Payments owing to him from John Grady were no business of mine. He didn’t seem to agree.
‘I am a collector, Mr. Matheson. I collect debts, but I also have an interest in other items. In lieu of the debt left outstanding by the previous owner, I will accept some small item of furniture from the house. It will barely cover my expenses, but in this case a token gesture will be sufficient. The house contains a number of ornate mirrors. If you give one of them to me, I will consider you to have discharged any responsibilities you may have in this matter.’
“That was exactly how he spoke,” said Matheson. “He spoke like a damn lawyer. Well, I’d had enough of him by then, so I told him to get the hell out of my office or I’d call the cops. He had any more questions, he could discuss them with my legal people, or with the Farmers’ Mutual, but I didn’t want to see him again.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t move. He just looked at his fingernails for a while before he stood, said that he was sorry I felt that way, and told me that he would deal with the matter through ‘other channels.’ Then he left.”
“Did you get a look at his car?”
“There wasn’t one. He left on foot.”
“And he gave you no contact name, no number?”
“Nothing. He just told me he was a collector.”
“Did you talk to the police about this?”
“I told Chief Grass in Two Mile, but he said there were probably a whole lot of debts left unpaid when John Grady died. He took down the description I gave him, but he said there wasn’t much that he could do unless the collector came back, or used threats.”
“Did you feel as if he was threatening you in your office? He did speak of going through ‘other channels’ for his payment.”
“I suppose it could have been a threat. I didn’t take it that way.”
“And he never mentioned what the debt was, or whom he was representing?”
“No.”
“Do you think this man might be the one responsible for placing the photograph in the mailbox?”
“It’s possible, but I can’t see why he would do it. He certainly didn’t mention anything to do with pictures.”
Matheson asked if I wanted another coffee. I said yes, if only to give me a little time to think. His story about the collector made me uneasy, and I didn’t particularly want to sit in my car watching an old house night after night, waiting for some lowlife in old clothes who got kicks from planting the pictures of children in a dead child murderer’s mailbox, but something about that photograph of the girl was drawing me in. I had this much in common with Matheson: both of us had lost a daughter, and neither of us was prepared to stand idly by if another child was potentially in danger. Looking back, I guess I knew I would take the case as soon as he showed me the picture of the little girl with the bat in her hands.
When he came back, I told him my rates. He offered to pay me in advance, but I explained that I’d bill him after the first week. If I was making no progress after two weeks, then I’d have to leave it to the cops. Matheson agreed and prepared to depart. He left the photograph of the unknown girl with me.
“I made lots of copies,” he said. “If you hadn’t agreed to do this, I was going to post them in stores, on telephone poles, anywhere they might be seen.”
“How many copies did you make?” I asked.
“Two thousand,” he replied. “They’re in the trunk of my car. You want some?”
I took one hundred of them, and left him with the rest.
I just hoped that we wouldn’t have cause to use them.
III
The house was silent and dark when I returned home. Rachel was attending a meeting of the Friends of the Scarborough Public Library, and I didn’t expect her back until later. I stood at the door for a moment and looked out upon the marshes. The great migratory exodus was almost complete, and the quiet of the grasses was now relatively undisturbed for much of the day. The sounds of the birds that remained with us stood out more clearly than before as a consequence, and in recent days I thought I had heard grackles and cowbirds and goldfinches. I wondered if there was an added lightness to their calls now, triggered by an awareness that the population of raptors was now depleted, as some of the hawks and harriers would inevitably have followed their prey south. Then again, the hunters that had stayed would now be competing for a more limited food supply. When the snows came, hunger would start to gnaw at them.
The move here, following the sale of my grandfather’s old house a few miles away, was a good one, tarnished only by an incident earlier in the year that had led to the drowning of a man out on the marshes. Rachel didn’t like to talk about it, and I didn’t push her on the subject. I wanted very badly for us to be happy here. Perhaps, after all that had gone before, I wanted that happiness too much.
As I opened the door, Walter, our Lab retriever, emerged guiltily from my little office, where I was pretty certain he’d been curled up on the couch, then tried to divert my attention by covering me with dog spit. I briefly considered shouting at him for putting hairs on my favorite resting place, then realized from his slightly shameful posture that he already knew he wasn’t supposed to be on it and that, frankly, we both understood that if he hadn’t been deep in dog sleep when I arrived he would have been smart enough to make a dash for his basket before I even managed to get my key in the lock. Instead, I contented myself with letting him out into the yard, then closing the door behind him while I made a sandwich from cold cuts.
I put A History of Sport Fishing, the album I’d bought by Thee More Shallows, on the CD player in the kitchen before sitting down at the table to eat, until the sound of Walter’s paw plaintively scratching at the glass caused me to relent and head out onto the porch instead. Walter had me down pat. He knew I couldn’t stay mad at him for long. Pretty soon, he’d be throwing sticks and I’d be running to fetch them. I fed him about a quarter of my sandwich, even as I recalled Rachel reading me an article about dog training that said that you shouldn’t feed your dog scraps from the table, or allow him to jump up and lick you, because that made him believe he was the alpha male.