Now I was working as bar manager at the Great Lost Bear in Portland, which wasn’t bad work and usually only took up four days each week, but it wasn’t what I was good at. It didn’t seem as though there was a great deal of sympa by¡eal of sythy for my plight in the local law enforcement community. I couldn’t recall how I’d made so many enemies until Aimee took the trouble to explain exactly how I’d managed it, and then it had all become a little clearer to me.
Strangely, I didn’t care about what had occurred as much as Hansen and his superiors might have thought. It had dented my pride, and my lawyer was fighting in my name partly on principle and mostly because I didn’t want Hansen and those above him to think that I would just roll over and die on their say-so, but in a sense I was almost satisfied that I couldn’t practice as a PI. It left me free, relieving me of the obligation to help others. If I were to take on a case, however informally, it would probably land me in jail. The state police’s actions had given me permission to be selfish, and to pursue my own aims. It had taken me some months to decide that that was what I was going to do.
Despite what the old man, Durand, might have thought earlier that day, I hadn’t chosen lightly to delve into my past and to question the circumstances of my father’s death. A man, a foul man who used the name Kushiel but was better known as the Collector, had whispered to me that my family had secrets, that my blood group could not have been the result of my assumed parentage. For a time, I tried to hide from myself what he had said. I did not want to believe it. I think that I took the job in the bar in part as a form of escape. I replaced my obligations to clients with my obligations to Dave Evans, one of the owners of the Bear, and the man who had offered me the job. But as time passed, and winter came again, I made a decision.
Because the Collector had not been lying, not entirely. The blood groups did not match.
When the new year dawned, I started asking questions. I began trying to contact those who had known my father, and especially the cops who had worked alongside him. Some were dead. Others had fallen off the radar after retirement, as sometimes happens with those who have served their time and desire only to collect their pensions and walk away from it all. But I knew the names of the two men to whom my father had been particularly close, beat cops who had graduated from the academy alongside him: Eddie Grace, who was a couple of years older than my father; and Jimmy Gallagher, my father’s old partner and closest friend. My mother had sometimes referred semifondly to my father and Jimmy as the “Birthday Boys,” a reference to their twice yearly nights on the town. Those were the only times when my father would stay out all night, eventually reappearing shortly before noon the following day, when he would return quietly, almost apologetically, slightly the worse for wear but never sick or stumbling, and sleep until the evening. My mother never commented on it. It was an indulgence that she permitted him, and he was a man of few indulgences, or so it seemed to me.
And then there was Jimmy Gallagher himself. I hadn’t seen him since shortly after the funeral, when he had come to the house to ask how my mother and I were doing, and she had told him that she intended to leave Pearl River and return to Maine. My mother had sent me to bed, but what teenager would not have listened at the top of the stairs, seeking some of the information that he was certain was being withheld from him. And I heard my mother say:
“How much did you know, Jimmy?”
“About what?”
“About all of it: the girl, the people who came. How much did you know?”
“I knew about the girl. The others…”
I could almost see him shrugging.
“Will said they were the same people.”
Jimmy did not answer for a time. Then: “That’s not possible. You know that it’s not. I killed one of them, and the other died months before. The dead don’t return, not like that.”
“He whispered it to me, Jimmy.” The tears were being held back, but only barely. “It was one of the last things he said to me. He said it was them.”
“He was frightened, Elaine, frightened for you and the boy.”
“But he killed them, Jimmy. He killed them, and they weren’t even armed.”
“I don’t know why-”
“I know why: he wanted to stop them. He knew that they would come back in the end. They wouldn’t need guns. They’d use their bare hands if they had to. Maybe-”
“What?”
“Maybe they’d even have preferred it that way,” she concluded.
Now she began to cry. I heard Jimmy stand, and I knew that he was putting his arms around her, consoling her.
“We’ll never know for sure. This I do know: he loved you. He loved you both, and he was sorry for all that he did to hurt you. I think he spent those years trying to make it up to you, but he never could. It wasn’t your fault. He couldn’t forgive himself, that’s all. He just couldn’t do it…”
My mother’s sobbing increased in intensity, and I turned away and went as quietly as I could to my room, where I watched the moon from my window and stared out at Franklin Avenue, and the paths that my father would never walk again.
The server came to take away our plates. He seemed impressed with Angel and Louis’s demolition of their food, and commensurately disappointed in me. We ordered coffee, and watched the place begin to empty.
“Is there anything we can do?” asked Angel.
“No. I think this one is mine.”
He must have spotted something playing on my mind, its movements replicated on my face.
“What aren’t you telling us?”
“The old man, Durand, he said that a young man-late twenties, according to him, maybe a little older-had come to his place a couple of months ago. He was snooping around. Durand called him on it, and the guy said he was ‘hunting.’”
“In Pearl River?” said Angel. “What was he hunting: leprechauns?”
Louis spoke. “Might be nothing to do with you.”
“Might not,” I agreed. “But he asked if Durand knew what had happened there.”
“Thrill seeker. Murder tourist. You’ve had them before.”
“Durand said that the guy made him uneasy, that’s all. He couldn’t put his finger on why.”
“Not much you can do, then, unless he shows up again.”
“Yeah, a late twenty-something guy in New York who makes people uneasy. Shouldn’t be hard to spot. Hell, that description even covers half of the Mets’ starting lineup.”
We paid the tab, then headed out into the night.
“You call us, anytime,” said Angel. “We’re around.”
They hailed a cab, and I watched them head uptown. When they were gone from sight, I went back into the restaurant and sat at the bar, sipping another glass of wine. I thought about the hunter and wondered if it was me he was hunting.
And part of me willed him to come.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GREAT LOST BEAR was a Portland institution. It occupied a space on Forrest Avenue, away from the main tourist drag of the Old Port, that had once housed a bar called Bottom’s Up. Semibig bands used to play there, groups that were either on their way up, or on their way down, or had just reached a plateau where all that mattered was a paying gig in front of a decent-size crowd, preferably one that wasn’t about to start hurling bottles when they departed from the hits to play a new song.
The stage lighting was still in place in the restaurant area, which always gave the impression that either the diners were only a prelude to the main act, or they were the main act. Half of the building also used to be a bakery, and at 11:30 P.M., as the bar was serving last rounds, the place would fill with the smell of baking bread, driving the customers into paroxysms of the munchies just after the kitchens had closed.