In 1689, the parliament in London passed the Toleration Act, which gave nonconformists the right to their own teachers, preachers and places of worship, but it seemed that some Familists had already made the decision to abandon the shores of England entirely. It may have been that they had simply grown weary of hiding, and had lost faith in their own government. The only hint of a deeper discontent lay in the footnotes of an essay I found entitled ‘The Flight West: NonConformist Churches and the Goodness of God in Early New England Settlements’, in which it was suggested that the Familists who formed the Congregation had been forced out of England because they were so nonconformist as to be almost pagan.
This corresponded to a couple of paragraphs in Jude’s book on church architecture, which stated that the Congregation’s church was notable for its carved figurines, including numerous ‘foliate heads’, part of a tradition of carving ancient fertility symbols and nature spirits on Christian buildings. Such decorations were routinely tolerated, even embraced, on older houses of worship. They were a kind of tacit recognition by the early church fathers of the link between the people and the land in agrarian communities. In the case of the building that eventually found its way to Maine, though, the general consensus among the sect’s opponents was that the heads were more than merely decorative: they were the object of Familist worship, and it was the Christian symbols that were merely incidental. As I parked just off Main Street, it struck me as odd that a congregation with a history of concealment should have placed enough value on an old church building to transport it across the Atlantic Ocean. This might be a church worth seeing.
The interior of the town office, housed in a brownstone nineteenth-century building with a modern extension to the rear, was bright and clean. When I asked to see the chief of police, I was directed to a comfortable chair and offered coffee while a call was put through to his office. The coffee came with a cookie on a napkin. If I stayed long enough, someone would probably have offered me a pillow and a blanket. Instead, I passed the minutes looking at the images of Prosperous through the years that decorated the walls. It hadn’t changed much over the centuries. The names on the storefronts remained mostly the same, and only the cars on the streets, and the fashions of the men and women in the photographs, gave any clues to the passage of time.
A door opened to my right, and a man in uniform appeared. He was taller than me and broader in the back and shoulders, and his neatly pressed dark blue shirt was open at the neck to reveal a startlingly white T-shirt beneath. His hair was dark brown. He wore rimless bifocal spectacles, and a SIG as a sidearm. All things considered, he looked like an accountant who worked out most evenings. Only his eyes spoiled the effect. They were a pale gray, the color of a winter sky presaging snow.
‘Lucas Morland,’ he said, as he shook my hand. ‘I’m chief of police here.’
‘Charlie Parker.’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr Parker,’ he said, and he appeared to mean it. ‘I’ve read a lot about you. I see you’ve already been given coffee. You need a top off?’
I told him I was fine with what I had, and he invited me to step into his office. It was hard to tell what color the walls might be as they were covered with enough certifcates and awards to render paint pretty much redundant. On his desk were various photographs of a dark-haired woman and two dark-haired boys. Chief Morland wasn’t in any of them. I wondered if he was separated. Then again, he may just have been the one taking the photographs. I was in danger of becoming a ‘glass half-empty’ kind of guy. Or a ‘glass emptier’ guy.
Or maybe a ‘What glass?’ guy.
‘You have a nice town,’ I said.
‘It’s not mine. I just look out for it. We all do, in our way. You considering moving here?’
‘I don’t think I could afford the taxes.’
‘Try doing it on a cop’s salary.’
‘That’s probably how communism started. You’d better keep your voice down or they’ll start looking for another chief.’
He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. I noticed that he had a small belly. That was the problem with quiet towns: there wasn’t much that one could do in them to burn calories.
‘Oh, we have all kinds here,’ said Morland. ‘Did you notice the motto on the sign as you came into town?’
‘I can’t say that I did.’
‘It’s easy to miss, I guess. It’s just one word: Tolerance.’
‘Pithy.’
He looked out the window and watched a stream of elementary school kids waddle by, each with one hand clinging tightly to a pink rope. It was a clear day, but cold, and they were wrapped in so many layers that it was impossible to see their faces. Once the kids had disappeared from view, and he was content that nothing had befallen them, or was likely to, he returned his attention to me.
‘So how can I help you, Mr Parker?’
I handed him a copy of a photograph of Jude that I’d found at the Portland Help Center. It had been taken at a Christmas lunch the previous year, and Jude was smiling in a tan suit and white shirt accessorized by a piece of tinsel in place of a tie. A pedant would have pointed out that the suit was too close to cream for the time of year, but Jude wouldn’t have cared.
‘I was wondering if you’d seen this man around Prosperous recently, or if he’d had any contact with your department,’ I said.
Morland wrinkled his nose and peered at the photograph through the lower part of his bifocals.
‘Yes, I recall him. He came in here asking about his daughter. His name was …’
Morland tapped his fingers on his desk as he sought the name.
‘Jude,’ he said finally. ‘That was it: Jude. When I asked him if that was his first or last name, he told me it was both. Is he in trouble, or did he hire you? Being honest, he didn’t seem like the kind of fella who had money to be hiring private detectives.’
‘No, he didn’t hire me, and his troubles, whatever they were, are over now.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘He was found hanged in a basement in Portland about a week ago.’
Morland nodded.
‘I think I recall reading something about that now.’
The discovery of Jude had merited a paragraph in the Press Herald, followed by a slightly longer feature in the Maine Sunday Telegram about the pressures faced by the city’s homeless.
‘You say that he was asking about his daughter?’
‘That’s right,’ said Morland. ‘Annie Broyer. He claimed that someone at a women’s shelter in Bangor told him that she was headed up this way. Apparently she’d been offered a job here by an older couple, or that was the story he’d heard. He wanted to know if we’d seen her. He had a photograph of her, but it was old. He described her well, though, or well enough for me to be able to tell him that no young woman of that description had found her way into this town, or none that I knew of, and I know them all.’
‘And was he happy with that?’
Morland’s face bore an expression I’d seen a thousand times. I’d probably worn it myself on occasion. It was the face of a public servant who just wasn’t paid enough to deal with the unhappiness of those for whom the reality of a situation wasn’t satisfactory.
‘No, Mr Parker, he was not. He wanted me to take him to every house in Prosperous that might be occupied by an older couple and have me show them the photograph of his daughter. In fact, he went so far as to suggest we ought to search the houses of everyone over sixty, just in case they had her locked up in their home.’
‘I take it that wasn’t an option.’
Morland spread his hands helplessly.
‘He hadn’t reported his daughter missing. He didn’t even know if she was missing. He just had a feeling in his bones that something was wrong. But the more we got into it, the more apparent it became that he didn’t really know his daughter at all. That was when I discovered that she’d been living in a women’s shelter and he was homeless and they were estranged. It all got sort of messy from there.’