“You mean setting the cops on you? You were terrorizing a young woman. That also seems kind of low. You need to reconsider your standards. They’re all screwed up.”
He might have heard me, but he wasn’t really listening. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at a spot somewhere over my right shoulder, letting me know that I wasn’t even worthy of eye contact.
“Men ought to deal with each other like men,” he continued, red rising into his face as though he were being boiled from below. “You set the hounds on me when all I wanted to do was talk. You and missy both, you got no honor.”
“Let me buy you breakfast,” I said. “Maybe we can work something out.”
Merrick waved a hand in dismissal.
“Keep your breakfast and your talk. The time for talking with you is done.”
“You may not believe this, but I have some sympathy for you,” I said. “You want to find out what happened to your daughter. I know what that feels like. If I can help you, then I will, but scaring Rebecca Clay isn’t the way to go about it. If you approach her again, you’ll be picked up and put back behind bars: the Cumberland County lockup if you’re lucky, but Warren if you’re not. That could be another year out of your life, another year spent not getting any closer to finding out the truth about your daughter’s disappearance.”
Merrick looked at me for the first time since we’d begun talking.
“I’m done with the Clay woman,” he said. “But I ain’t done with you. I’ll give you some advice, though, in return for what you just gave me. Stay out of this, and maybe I’ll be merciful the next time our paths cross.”
With that he pushed past me and began walking toward the bus station. He looked smaller than before, his shoulders slightly hunched, his jeans stained from his time behind bars. Once again, I felt pity for him. Despite all that I knew about him, and all that he was suspected of doing, he was still a father seeking his lost child. Perhaps it was all he had left, but I knew the damage that could be caused by that kind of single-minded intensity. I knew because I had once wrought it myself. Rebecca Clay might be safe from him, at least for the present, but Merrick was not going to stop. He would keep looking until he found out the truth, or until someone forced him to desist. Either way, it could only end with a death.
I called Rebecca and told her that I didn’t believe Merrick would trouble her for the time being, but there were no guarantees.
“I understand,” she said. “I don’t want men outside my house any longer, though. I can’t live that way. Will you thank them for me, and bill me?”
“One last thing, Ms. Clay,” I said. “If the choice was given to you, would you want your father found?”
She thought about the question.
“Wherever he is, he made the choice that brought him there,” she said softly. “I told you before: I think sometimes about Jim Poole. He went away, and he never came back. I like to pretend that I don’t know if it was because of me, if he vanished because I asked him to look for my father, or if something else happened to him, something equally bad. But when I can’t sleep, when I’m lying alone in my room in the darkness, I know it was my fault. In the daylight, I can convince myself that it wasn’t, but I know the truth. I don’t know you, Mr. Parker. I asked you to help me, and you did, and I’ll pay you for your time and your efforts, but we don’t know each other. If something were to happen to you because you asked questions about my father, then we’d be bound by it, and I don’t want to be bound to you, not like that. Do you understand? I’m trying to let it go. I want you to do the same.”
She hung up. Maybe she was right. Maybe Daniel Clay should be left wherever he was, either above or below ground. But it wasn’t up to her, or me, not any longer. Merrick was out there, and so was the person who had instructed Eldritch to bankroll him. Rebecca Clay’s part in this might have been over, but mine wasn’t.
When the Maine State Prison was based in Thomaston, it was hard to miss. It stood slap bang on the main road into town, a massive edifice on Route 1 that had survived two fires and, even after being rebuilt, renovated, extended, and occasionally updated, still resembled the early-nineteenth-century penitentiary that it had once been. It felt like the town itself had developed around the prison, although in truth there had been a trading post at Thomaston since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the prison dominated the landscape of the community, both physically and, perhaps, psychologically. If one mentioned Thomaston to anyone in Maine, the first thing that came to mind was the penitentiary. I wondered sometimes what it was like to live in a place whose principal claim to fame was the incarceration of human beings. It might have been that, after a while, you just forgot about it, or failed to notice the effect it had on the people and the town. Perhaps it was only those who visited Thomaston who immediately felt that an oppressive miasma hung over the place, as though the misery of those locked behind the prison’s walls had seeped into the atmosphere, coloring it with gray, weighing it down like particles of lead in the air. Then again, it certainly kept the crime rate low. Thomaston was the kind of place where there was a violent crime once every two or three years, and its crime index was about one-third of the national average. It might have been that the presence of a huge prison on the doorstep made those tempted by a life of crime reconsider their career options.
Warren was different, though. The town was a little larger than Thomaston, and its identity was not so bound up with the penitentiary. The new state prison had grown gradually, beginning with the opening of the Supermax, then the Mental Health Stabilization Unit, and finally the transfer of the general population from Thomaston to the new facility. Compared to the old prison, it was a little harder to find, squirreled away on Route 97, or at least as squirreled away as a place with a thousand prisoners and four hundred employees can be. I drove along Cushing Road, past the Bolduc Correctional Facility on the left, until I came to the brick and stone sign to the right of the road announcing the Maine State Prison, with the years 1824 and 2001 beneath, the first commemorating the founding of the original prison and the second the opening of the new facility.
Warren looked more like a modern industrial plant than a prison, an impression reinforced by the big maintenance area to the right that appeared to house the prison’s power plant. Bird feeders made from buoys hung on the lawn outside the main entrance, and everything looked new and freshly painted. It was the silence that gave away the true nature of the place, though; that, and the name, white on green above the door, and the razor wire on top of the double fencing, and the presence of the blue-uniformed guards with their striped trousers, and the beaten-down look of those waiting in the lobby to visit their loved ones. All told, you didn’t have to look too hard to figure out that, whatever cosmetic adjustments had been made to the façade, this was still as much a prison as Thomaston ever was.
Aimee Price had clearly pulled some strings to get me access to Andy Kellog. Visitor clearances could sometimes take up to six weeks. Then again, Price was entitled to see her client whenever she chose, and I wasn’t exactly unknown to the prison authorities. I had visited the preacher Faulkner when he was incarcerated at Thomaston, an encounter that had been memorable for all the wrong reasons, but this was my first time at the new facility.
It wasn’t a complete surprise, therefore, to see a familiar figure standing beside Price when I eventually cleared security and entered the body of the prison: Joe Long, the colonel of the guards. He hadn’t changed much since last we’d met. He was still big, still taciturn, and still radiated the kind of authority that kept a thousand criminals on the right side of respectful. His uniform was starched and pressed, and everything that was supposed to gleam did so spectacularly. There was a little more gray in his mustache than before, but I decided not to point that out. Beneath his gruff exterior, I sensed there was a sensitive child just waiting to be hugged. I didn’t want to hurt his feeling, singular.