“What then?” asked Rebecca.
“I’m pretty certain that he’s not going to bother you again. I saw what happened when they told him he was going to be locked up for the weekend. He’s not afraid of jail, but he is afraid of losing his freedom to search for his daughter. That freedom is now tied up with your continued well-being. I’ll serve him with the court order upon his release, but, if you’re agreeable, we’ll keep an eye on you for a day or two after he’s released, just in case.”
“I want to bring Jenna home,” she said.
“I wouldn’t advise that just yet.”
“I’m worried about her. This whole business, I think it’s affecting her.”
“Why?”
“I found pictures in her room. Drawings.”
“Drawings of what?”
“Of men, men with pale faces and no eyes. She said that she’d seen them or dreamed them, or something. I want her close to me.”
I didn’t tell Rebecca that others had seen those men too, myself included. It seemed better to let her believe for now that they were a product of her daughter’s troubled imagination, and nothing more.
“Soon,” I said. “Just give me a few more days.”
Reluctantly, she agreed.
That evening, Angel, Louis, and I had dinner at Fore Street. Louis had gone to the bar to examine the vodka options, leaving Angel and me to talk.
“You’ve lost weight,” said Angel, sniffing and snowing fragments of tissue on the table. I had no idea what he had been doing in Napa to contract a cold, but I was pretty certain that I didn’t want him to tell me. “You look good. Even your clothes look good.”
“It’s the new me. I eat well, still go to the gym, walk the dog.”
“Uh-huh. Nice clothes, eating well, going to the gym, owning a dog.” He thought for a moment. “You sure you’re not gay?”
“I can’t be gay,” I said. “I’m very busy as it is.”
“Maybe that’s why I like you,” he said. “You’re a gay nongay.” Angel had arrived wearing one of my cast-off brown leather bomber jackets, the material so worn in places that it had faded entirely to white. His aged Wranglers had an embroidered wave pattern on the back pockets, and he was wearing a Hall and Oates T-shirt, which meant that the time in Angel land was approximately a quarter after 1981.
“Can you be a gay homophobe?” I asked.
“Sure. It’s like being a self-hating Jew, except the food is better.” Louis returned.
“I’ve been telling him how gay he is,” said Angel, as he buttered a piece of bread. A fragment of butter fell on his T-shirt. He carefully used a finger to remove it and licked the digit clean. Louis’s face remained impassive, only the slightest narrowing of his eyes indicating the depth of the emotions he was feeling.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “I don’t think you’re the right guy to front the recruitment drive.”
While we ate, we talked about Merrick, and what I had learned from Aimee Price. Earlier that day, I had put in a call to Matt Mayberry, a Realtor I knew down in Massachusetts whose company did business all over New England, asking him if there was a way he could find out about any properties in the greater Portland area with which Eldritch and Associates had been involved in recent years. It was a long shot. I had spent most of the afternoon making calls to hotels and motels, but I had drawn a blank every time I asked for Frank Merrick’s room. Still, it would be useful to know where Merrick was likely to bolt once he was released.
“You seen Rachel lately?” asked Angel.
“A few weeks back.”
“How are things between you?”
“Not so good.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Yeah.”
“You got to keep trying, you know that?”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Maybe you should go see her, while Merrick is safe behind bars.”
I thought about it as the check arrived. I knew then that I wanted to see them both. I wanted to hold Sam, and talk to Rachel. I was tired of hearing about men who tormented children and the troubled lives they had left in their wake.
Louis began counting out bills.
“Maybe I will go to see them,” I said.
“We’ll walk your dog,” said Angel. “If he’s secretly gay like you, he won’t object.”
Chapter XVI
It was a long ride to the property Rachel and Sam now shared with Rachel’s parents in Vermont, and I spent most of it driving in silence, going over all that I had learned about Daniel Clay and Frank Merrick, and trying to figure out where Eldritch’s client fitted into the whole affair. Eldritch had told me that his client had no interest in Daniel Clay, yet they were both facilitating Merrick, who was obsessed with Clay. And then there were the Hollow Men, whatever they were. I had seen them, or perhaps it would be more true to say that they had entered my zone of perception. The maid at Joel Harmon’s house had seen them too and, as I had learned from the brief conversation with Rebecca Clay the night before, her daughter, Jenna, had drawn pictures of them before she left the city. The connection appeared to be Merrick, but when he was asked during his interrogation if he was working alone, or if he had brought others with him, he had seemed genuinely surprised and had responded in the negative. The questions remained: who were they, and what was their purpose?
Rachel’s parents had gone away for the weekend and weren’t due back until Monday, so Rachel’s sister had come to stay in order to help with Sam. Sam had grown so much, even in the few weeks since I had last seen her, or perhaps that was just the view of a father conscious of the fact that he was separated from his daughter, and that the stages of her development would from now on be revealed to him in leaps rather than steps.
Was I simply being pessimistic? I didn’t know. Rachel and I still spoke regularly on the phone. I missed her, and I thought that she missed me, but on the recent occasions when we had met, her parents were present, or Sam was acting up, or there was something else that seemed to get in the way of talking about ourselves and how things had become so bad between us. I couldn’t figure out if we were allowing these intrusions to become obstacles in order to avoid some kind of final confrontation, or if they truly were what they seemed to be. A period apart to allow us both to figure out how we wanted to live this life had become something longer and more complicated and, it appeared, more final. Rachel and Sam had moved back to Scarborough for a time in May, but Rachel and I had fought, and there was a distance between us that had not existed before. She had been uncomfortable in the house that we had once shared more easily, and Sam had trouble sleeping in her room. Had we simply grown used to being without each another, even though I knew that I still craved her, and she me? We existed in a kind of strained limbo, where things were left unsaid for fear that to speak them aloud would cause the whole fragile edifice to collapse around us.
Rachel’s parents had converted some old stables on their property into a large guesthouse, and that was where Rachel lived with Sam. She was working again, employed on a contract basis with the Psychology Department of the University of Vermont in Burlington, taking tutorials and lecturing on criminal psychology. She told me a little about it as I sat at her kitchen table, but in the casual, passing way that one might describe one’s pursuits to a stranger at dinner. In the past, I would have been privy to every little detail, but not anymore.
Sam was squatting on the floor between us, playing with big plastic farm animals. She gripped two sheep in her chubby hands and pounded their heads together, then looked up and offered one to each of us. They were slick with baby drool.