John Grady stole children. He took the first, little Mattie Bristol, from North Anson in the autumn of 1979; the second, Evie Munger, from Fryeburg in the spring of 1980; the third, Nadine Lincoln, from South Paris, in the summer of 1980; Denny Maguire, the fourth victim, and the only one to survive, as he walked from school in Belfast in the third week of May 1981; and his final victim, Louise Matheson, while she was walking from her home in Shin Pond to the house of her best friend, Amy Lowell, on May 21, 1981.
That was his mistake, for Amy was so excited about her friend’s impending arrival that she was hiding in the woods at the verge of her house, hoping to leap out and surprise her. She watched Grady’s Lincoln pull up alongside her friend, saw the man inside lean over to speak to her, and then found herself unable to move as Grady’s big hand grabbed Louise by the hair and dragged her into the car. Amy’s parents heard her screaming, and within minutes the police were on their way, already mounting a search for a red Lincoln.
They did not have to look far. The abduction of Louise Matheson was a crime of opportunity for John Grady. His previous victims had been taken from towns elsewhere in the state, then brought west to be killed, but Shin Pond was barely ten miles from the Grady house. John Grady’s appetites had become increasingly hard to sate, and the release that he gained from their appeasement did not last as long as it once had. It is possible to imagine him, on the day that Louise Matheson was abducted, prowling the roads, his hunger gnawing at him, perhaps promising himself that he was only trying to distract himself from his appetites by taking a ride, that he did not really intend to seek out another victim.
John Grady was a tall, thin man. His hair was graying prematurely and cut close to his scalp, which served only to make his face seem even longer than it was. A calcium deficiency in his youth had given his chin an unfortunate prominence, one that he tried to hide by keeping his head low. He always wore a suit when out in public, set off by a bright bow tie and dark suspenders. There was something dated about him. His suits, though clean, gave the impression of having dwelt for some time in an attic or a thrift store. The shirts were a little frayed at the collars and cuffs. The bow ties looked faded rather than fresh, and bore wrinkles and stains that suggested many years of use.
John Grady had long fingers and large hands. Amy Lowell told the police that, when he gripped her friend’s head, the man’s fingers had closed on it entirely like the talons of a great bird, extending almost to her eyes. Despite her shock, Amy Lowell gave the police a good description of the individual who had taken Louise Matheson, and the vehicle that he drove. There were those who recalled John Grady’s ownership of a red Lincoln, and the police arrived at the Grady house and found the car. Nobody answered their knocks to the door, and a debate ensued on the porch steps of the Grady house concerning the nature of probable cause. It was curtailed by the sound, real or imagined, of a child’s cry, and the door was kicked in.
John Grady was standing in the hallway of his house. His great work remained uncompleted, and there were ladders and drapes everywhere. His left hand was on the handle of the door to his basement, and he held a gun in his right. Before he could be stopped, he darted through the basement door and locked it behind him. He had reinforced it specifically for such an eventuality, replacing the flimsy original with sturdy oak and strengthening it with steel bands and a security bar. It took the police twenty minutes to break it down.
When they entered the basement, Louise was dead. Slumped on the floor beside her was another child, a little boy. He was still alive, but unconscious from hunger and dehydration. This was Denny Maguire.
John Grady stood over them both with his gun to his head. His last words, before he pulled the trigger, were:
“This is not a house. This is a home.”
II
Winter was here. The north wind had almost stripped the last of the leaves from the trees, leaving only a sprinkling of foliage to threaten the dominion of the evergreens. Clusters of young beeches trembled beneath the canopy, and sugar maple seedlings lay sprinkled through the forests like lost gold. There was a kind of silence now in the woods, as animals prepared to slumber, or to die.
In Portland, the trees of the Old Port were festooned with white lights, and a Christmas tree burned brightly farther up on Congress. It was cold, although not as cold as the winters I recalled from my childhood. When I was young, we would spend New Year’s at my grandfather’s house in Scarborough. He and my father would share whiskey and war stories, for they were both policemen, although my grandfather had retired many years before. My mother would listen indulgently to tales that she had heard told over and over again, then hustle me off to my bed. Outside, the snow would gleam with a bluish tinge, lit by a bright moon in a clear, dark sky. I would sit at my window, wrapped in a blanket, and stare at it, following its contours, basking in the otherworldliness of it. Even on the darkest of nights, when the moon was invisible, the snow seemed to hold light within it. To the child gazing at it from his window, it glowed from deep inside, and I would fall asleep with the curtains open so that its unsullied beauty was the last thing I saw before my eyes closed, the voices of those whom I loved distantly rising and falling in low cadence.
In time, those voices from my past would be stilled. My grandfather, my parents, all were gone now. I found that I became what I had most feared when I was a child: a man whose blood ran only in his own veins, a figure without visible ties to those who had brought him into this world. And when I tried to anchor myself with a family of my own, that too was taken from me, and I drifted, and was lost for a time in places without names.
Yet at last I learned to recognize that I was not entirely alone, and that there were deep connections binding me to all that I had known. I had to come back to this place to find them, to reveal them where they had always lain, waiting beneath fallen leaves and compacted snow in the memory of a child seated by a window. My past and my present were here in this northern place, and, I hoped, my future too. Soon I would be a father again, for my lover Rachel was due to give birth in the coming weeks. I felt part of a circle slowly completing itself in this region of my childhood, and I thought that I would always remain here. During the long winter months, I would bitch and moan with the best of the old men. I would complain when my wheels became mired in mud during the spring thaw, or when filthy piles of iced snow upon shady corners continued their slow melt into March, sullying the streets in a futile rearguard action against the coming of spring. I would strike out at mosquitoes and greenheads during the summer, and watch my lawn disappear beneath brown leaves in fall.
Occasionally, even now, I would hear one of my neighbors joke about heading for Florida, that this was the last damn winter he could endure in the cold Northeast, but I knew that the speaker would never leave. It was part of the game we all played, the dance of which we were all a part. I could not live without seasons, for in seasons are reflected the rhythms of our existence: of birth and maturity, of decline and decay, yet always with the promise of renewal for those who remain. Perhaps I would alter my attitude as I grew older, as the winters took a greater toll upon me and the north wind brought with it a reminder only of my own mortality. I wondered, sometimes, if that was part of the appeal of Florida or Arizona for those in their later years: cut off from the seasons, it was possible to forget the rhythm that governed one’s life, even as one’s feet still moved to complete the final steps of the dance.