“You think it’s a metaphor for us?” I asked Rachel. She looked tired, but still beautiful. She caught me staring and brushed a strand of hair back over her ear, blushing slightly.
“I’m not sure that knocking our heads together would solve anything,” she said. “Although admittedly I’d get a sense of satisfaction from knocking your head against something.”
“Nice.”
She reached out and touched the back of my hand with her finger.
“I didn’t mean it to sound quite as harsh as it did.”
“It’s okay. If it’s any consolation, I often feel like beating my head against a wall too.”
“What about beating mine?”
“You’re too good-looking. And I’d be afraid of ruining your hair.”
I turned my hand palm up and held her finger.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “My sister will look after Sam.”
We rose, and she called her sister’s name. Pam entered the kitchen before I had a chance to release Rachel’s finger, and she gave us both a knowing look. It wasn’t disapproving, though, which was something. Had Rachel’s father seen us like this, he might well have reached for his rifle. I didn’t get on with him, and I knew that he hoped the relationship between his daughter and me was over for good.
“Why don’t I take Sam for a ride?” said Pam. “I have to go to the store anyway, and you know how she likes people-watching.” She knelt in front of Sam. “You wanna go for a ride with Aunt Pammie, huh? I’ll take you to the health section and show you all the stuff you’re gonna need when you’re a teenager and boys come calling. Maybe we can go look at guns too, huh?”
Sam let her aunt pick her up without complaint. Rachel followed them and helped her sister to get Sam ready, and to fit her into the child seat. Sam cried a little when the door closed and she realized that her mom wasn’t joining them, but we knew that it wouldn’t last long. She was fascinated by the car, and seemed to spend most of her time in it either watching the sky go by or just sleeping, lulled by the movement of the vehicle. We watched them drive off, then I followed Rachel across the garden and into the fields that bordered her parents’ house. She kept her arms folded across her chest, as though uneasy about the fact that she had held my hand earlier.
“How have you been?” she asked.
“Busy.”
“Anything interesting?”
I told her about Rebecca Clay and her father, and the arrival of Frank Merrick.
“What kind of man is he?” asked Rachel.
It was a strange question. “A dangerous one, and hard to read,” I replied. “He thinks Clay is still alive, and that he knows what happened to his daughter. Nobody else seems to be able to say different, but the general wisdom is that Clay is dead; that, or his daughter is the best actress I’ve ever met. Merrick tends toward the latter view. He used to be a freelance button man, a hired killer. He’s been in jail for a long time, but he doesn’t strike me as being rehabilitated. There’s more to him than that, though. He looked out for one of Clay’s patients while he was in the can, even getting himself sent to the Max so he could be close to him. I thought at first that it might be a jail thing-older guy-younger guy-but it doesn’t look like it was that way. Merrick ’s own daughter was one of Clay’s patients at the time that she disappeared. That may be why there was a bond between him and this kid, Kellog.”
“Maybe Merrick also hoped to learn something from Kellog that might lead him to his daughter,” said Rachel.
“Probably, but he shadowed this kid for years, and he protected him. It wouldn’t have taken him long to find out what Kellog knew, but he didn’t cut him loose. He stood by him. He took care of him, as best he could.”
“He couldn’t protect his own daughter, so he protected Kellog instead?”
“He’s a complex man.”
“You sound almost as though you respect him.”
I shook my head. “I pity him. I think I even understand him some. But I don’t respect him, not in the way that you mean.”
“There’s another way?”
I didn’t want to utter it. After all, it would lead us back to one of the reasons why Rachel and I had parted.
“Well?” she pressed, and I knew that she had already guessed what I was going to say. She wanted to hear it spoken, as though to confirm something sad but necessary.
“He has a lot of blood on his hands,” I said. “He doesn’t forgive.”
I could have been talking about myself, and once again I was aware of how much like Merrick I once was, and might still be. It was as though I had been given an opportunity to witness a version of myself decades down the line, older and more solitary, trying to right a wrong through force and the infliction of harm upon others.
“And now you’ve crossed him. You brought in the police. You got in the way of his efforts to find out the truth about his daughter’s disappearance. You respect him the way you’d respect an animal, because to do otherwise would be to underestimate him. You think you’re going to have to face him again, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Her brow wrinkled, and there was pain in her eyes. “It never changes, does it?”
I didn’t reply. What could I say?
Rachel didn’t pursue an answer. Instead, she said: “Is Kellog still in jail?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“I’m going to try. I’ve spoken to his lawyer. From what I hear, he’s not doing so good. Then again, he was never doing good, but if he stays in the Supermax for much longer, he’s going to be beyond rescuing. He was troubled before he got there. It sounds like he’s bordering on insane now.”
“Is it true what they say about that place?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
She didn’t speak again for a time. We walked through dead leaves. Sometimes, they made a sound like a parent hushing a child, soothing it, consoling it. At other times, the noise was empty and dry, crackling with the promise of the passing of all things.
“What about the psychiatrist, Clay? You say there were suspicions that he might have been providing information on the children to the abusers. Was there anything to implicate him directly in the abuse itself?”
“Nothing, or nothing that I’ve been able to find. His daughter’s view is that he couldn’t live with the guilt of failing to prevent it. He believed that he should have spotted what was happening. The kids were damaged before he even began treating them, just like Kellog. He was having trouble getting through to them, but his daughter remembers that he was making progress, or thought he was. Kellog’s lawyer confirmed as much about him. Whatever Clay did, it was working. I spoke to one of his peers, too, a doctor named Christian who runs a clinic for abused children. His main criticism of Clay seems to have been that he was too anxious to spot abuse. He had an agenda, and he got into some trouble over it that prevented him from making any further evaluations on cases for the state.”
Rachel stopped and knelt down. She picked a piece of rabbit-foot clover, still with one of its fuzzy, grayish pink flowers in place.
“This is supposed to stop blooming in September or October,” she said. “Yet here it is, still in flower. The world is changing.” She handed it to me. “For luck,” she said.
I held it in my palm, then carefully slipped it into the plastic pocket of my wallet.
“The question still remains: if the same people were involved in the abuse of different children, then how did they target them?” she asked. “From what you’ve told me, they picked the most vulnerable. How did they know?”
“Somebody told them,” I said. “Somebody fed children to them.”
“If not Clay, then who was it?”
“There was a committee formed to select the children who would be sent to Clay. It had mental health workers on it, and social workers. If I had to pick, I’d say it was one of them. But I’m sure the cops looked at that angle. They must have. Christian’s people did too. They came up with nothing.”