He rang the doorbell, and Hayley answered.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you—’ Morland began to say, but Hayley held up a hand to interrupt him.
‘It’s quite all right,’ she said. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
She invited him to step inside, then led him to the living room, where Pastor Warraner had already made himself at home in an armchair.
‘Shit,’ said Morland.
25
The woman on desk duty at the Tender House in Bangor was named Molly Bow, and she looked like she should have been fixed to the prow of a sailing ship. She was big and weathered, but attractive in a matronly way, and at one point I had to take a couple of steps back to avoid being crushed by her breasts as she passed me to get to a filing cabinet in her office.
‘Comin’ through,’ she said as I fattened my back against a wall. She gestured at her bosom. ‘I was born large. Backache apart, it’s been useful in life. People make an effort to get out of my way.’
Once again I had an image of a schooner or, better still, a man-of-war cleaving a path through the waves, but I kept my eyes fixed on a neutral spot on the opposite wall, well above chest height.
The Tender House had no signs outside to mark its presence. It was located in a pair of adjoining clapboard buildings surrounded by a white picket fence that was only slightly higher than those of its neighbors. Two cars were parked in the drive, which was secured by an automatically operated steel gate, also painted white. Inside the front door of the main building was a waiting room containing toys, a library of self-help books, boxes of tissues, large containers of secondhand clothes organized according to type and size, from infant to adult, and, in a discreet corner, toothbrushes, toothpaste and toiletries. Behind the reception desk was a small playroom.
The Tender House wasn’t a homeless shelter but rather a ‘crisis center’ for women, where homelessness was only one of the problems it tackled. It catered for victims of domestic and sexual abuse, runaways, and women who simply needed a place to stay while they tried to improve their situation. Its staff liaised with police and the courts, advising on everything from restraining orders to educational and job opportunities, but it generally steered the long-term homeless toward other agencies and centers.
‘Got it,’ said Bow, waving a file. She licked an index finger and flipped through some pages. ‘We had her for about eleven days, apart from the fifth night when someone broke out a couple of half gallons of Ten High over by Cascade Park. We had some sore heads the next day, Annie’s among them.’
‘Was she an alcoholic?’
‘No, I don’t think so. She’d been a user, but she claimed to be clean by the time she arrived at our door. We made it clear to her that we had a zero tolerance policy when it came to drugs. If she got high, she’d be back on the streets.’
‘And alcohol?’
‘Officially we’re down on that too. Unofficially, we give some leeway. Nothing on the premises, and no intoxication. Actually, I was disappointed when Annie came back to us all raw from the Ten High. I had her pegged as a young woman who was genuinely trying to change her life. We sat her down and had a talk with her. Turned out her estranged father had come looking for her, and her presence in town had thrown her. She was offered a sip or two to steady herself, and it all got sort of blurry for her after that.’
‘Did she say anything about her relationship with her father?’
Bow was clearly reluctant to share confidences. I could understand her reservations.
‘Annie is missing, and her father is dead,’ I said.
‘I know that. He hanged himself in a basement down in Portland.’
I gave it a couple of seconds.
‘He was found hanging in a basement in Portland,’ I corrected her. It was minor, but it was important.
Molly sat behind her desk. She’d been standing until then. We both had. As she sat, so did I.
‘Is that why you’re here – because you don’t think it was suicide?’
‘So far I don’t have any proof that it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘A couple of small details are just snagging like briars.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as the fact that he loved his daughter, and clearly wanted to reestablish contact with her. He had spoken of heading up here to be closer to her. He’d also gone to a lot of trouble to pull together some money in the days before he died. He succeeded too. Those aren’t the actions of a suicidal man.’
‘What was the money for?’
It struck me that I was on the wrong side of an interrogation: I should have been asking the questions, not her, but sometimes you had to retreat an inch to gain a foot.
‘To support him as he tried to find his daughter. I think he was also hoping to hire me to help look for her.’
‘So how much money did he manage to collect?’
‘More than a hundred dollars.’
‘Do you work that cheap?’
‘Funny, you’re the second person who’s asked me that. I could have given him a couple of hours, or more if I took the time from some of my wealthier clients.’
‘Isn’t that unethical?’
‘Only if I don’t tell them I’m doing it. You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don’t do fractions. Look, do you think I might get to ask a question at any point?’
Bow smiled. ‘You just did.’
Hell.
She leaned back in her chair, like a reigning champ who had dispensed with another challenger to her crown, then threw me a bone of consolation.
‘I’m joshing with you,’ she said. ‘You’d be surprised how many people I get in here asking questions about the women in our care. I have to be careful, for their sakes.’
‘What kind of people?’
‘Sometimes we have women who turn tricks when times are desperate, and a john will come looking for one of them just because he’s a creep, or he’s got a beef about the service he received, or he liked it so much he wants a second bite. We get husbands and boyfriends trying to take back their possessions, because the kind who come storming in here mostly regard women as chattel. Oh, they’ll do their best to dress it up as nicely as they can – they want to talk things over, to give the relationship another try, and they’re sorry for whatever it is that they’ve done, which usually involves a fist or a boot, often with a little domestic rape thrown in along the way – but I’ve developed a nose for the worst of them. It’s not hard. As soon as you put an obstacle in their way the threats start to emerge, but those ones are usually pretty dumb along with it. They mooch around in the hope that they’ll be able to snatch their woman off the street, but we have a good relationship with the Bangor PD, and they’ll get here before I’ve hung up the phone.
‘But we’ve had men try to break in, or beat up volunteers. Last year, one even tried to burn us down by starting a fire at the back door. At the same time, we try to keep channels of communication open between women and their families. This is a place to which women – and their children – come when they’re desperate. It isn’t a long-term solution. We make that clear to them from the start, but I’ve been seeing some of the women who pass through these doors on and off for the past ten years. They just get older and more bruised. There are times when I wonder how far we’ve come as a society where women are concerned. Whenever I turn on the TV to hear some jackass in a blazer bleating about feminists I want to set him on fire, and don’t get me started on those dumb bitches who find themselves on the top of the pile only to reject the whole concept of feminism, as though their success wasn’t built on the struggles of generations of women. I defy them to spend one day here with a forty-year-old woman whose husband has been stubbing out cigarettes on her for so long that he has to search for a spot where it still hurts, or a nineteen-year-old girl who has to wear diapers because of what her stepfather did to her, and tell me that they’re not feminists.’