‘Pictures, too,’ I said.
‘If you color any of them in, we may be forced to have a long talk.’
‘One last question?’ I said.
‘Go right ahead.’
‘Why are so many of these faces threatening or hostile?’
‘Fear,’ said Williamson. ‘Fear of the power of nature, fear of old gods. And perhaps, too, the early Church found in such depictions a literal representation of a metaphorical concept: the radix malorum, the “root of all evil”. Hell, if you choose to believe in it, is beneath our feet, not above our heads. You’d have to dig deep to find it, but it wasn’t difficult for Christians with ancient links to the land to conceive of the influence of the malefcent in terms of twisted roots and clinging ivy, of faces formed by something buried far beneath the earth trying to create a physical representation of itself from whatever materials were at hand. But the god depicted on the walls of the Prosperous chapel has no connection with Christianity. It’s older, and beyond conceptions of good and evil. It simply is.’
‘You sound almost as though you believe in it yourself.’
‘Perhaps I just sometimes find it easier to understand how someone could conceive and worship a god of tree and leaf, a god that formed as the land around it formed, than a bearded figure living on a cloud in the sky.’
‘Does that count as a crisis of faith?’
He grinned again. ‘No, only a natural consequence of the study of every shade of religious belief, and of trying to teach the importance of being tolerant in a world in which tolerance is associated with weakness or heresy.’
‘Let me guess: you and Michael Warraner didn’t exactly see eye to eye on that subject.’
‘No. He wasn’t hostile toward other forms of religious belief, merely uninterested.’
‘When I see him again, should I pass on your good wishes?’ I said.
‘I’d prefer if you didn’t,’ said Williamson.
‘Frightened?’
‘Wary. You should be too.’ He was no longer distracted, no longer smiling. ‘One of the challenges I like to set my students for their first class is a word-association game. I ask them to list all of the words, positive or negative, that come to mind when they think of god. Sometimes I get pages of words, at other times a handful, but Warraner was the only student who ever wrote just one solitary word. That word was “hunger”. He and those like him worship a hungry god, Mr ‘Parker, and no good can ever come of worshipping a deity that hungers. No good at all.’
37
Idrove back to Scarborough, but stopped off at Bull Moose Music’s massive warehouse store on Payne Road and browsed the racks for an hour. It was part pleasure, part displacement activity. I felt that I’d reached a dead end as far as Prosperous was concerned, and my talk with Williamson had only served to confirm my own suspicions about Prosperous without opening any new avenues of inquiry.
I was no closer to finding Annie Broyer than I had been when I started out, and I was beginning to wonder if I might not have been mistaken in assuming that everything I had learned over the past week was useful or even true: an elderly couple, a blue car, a passing reference to a job in Prosperous made to a woman with the mental capacities of a child, and a homeless man’s obsession with the carvings on an ancient church. Every piece of information I had gathered was open to question, and it was entirely possible that Annie Broyer might turn up in Boston, or Chicago, or Seattle over the days and weeks to come. Even Lucas Morland’s passing reference to Annie as an ‘ex-junkie’ could be explained away if he had made a simple phone call to Portland or Bangor after my first visit to the town. In the eyes of some, I had already violated the primary commandment of an investigation: don’t assume. Don’t create patterns where there are none. Don’t conceive of a narrative and then force the evidence to ft it. On the other hand, all investigations involve a degree of speculation, the capacity to bear witness to a crime and imagine a chain of events that might have caused that crime to be committed. An investigation was not simply a matter of historical research, as Warraner had suggested. It was an act of faith both in one’s own capacities and in the possibility of justice in a world that had made justice subservient to the rule of law.
But I had no crime to investigate. I had only a homeless man with a history of depression who might well have hanged himself in a ft of desperation, and a missing girl with a history of narcotic and alcohol abuse who had drifted for most of her life. Was I fixating on Prosperous because its citizens were wealthy and privileged while Jude and his daughter were poor and suffering? Was I marking Warraner and Morland for simply doing what a pastor and a policeman should do, which was to protect their people?
And yet …
Michael Warraner wasn’t quite a fraud, but something potentially much more dangerous: a frustrated man with a set of religious or spiritual principles that reinforced his inflated opinion of himself and his place in the world. It was also clear from the way Morland reacted to my unauthorized visit to the church that Warraner had a position of authority in the town, which meant there were influential individuals who either shared his beliefs or didn’t entirely discount them.
What all that had to do – if anything – with the disappearance of Annie and the death of her father, I did not know. Prosperous just felt wrong to me, and I’d grown to trust my feelings. Then again, Angel and Louis might have asked if I ever felt right about anything, and if I’d learned to trust those feelings too. I could have countered by replying that nobody ever asked for my help when there wasn’t a problem, but I then found myself growing annoyed that I was having arguments – and more to the point, losing them – with Angel and Louis even when they weren’t actually present.
I headed into Portland, where I caught a movie at the Nickelodeon and then ate a burger at The Little Tap House on High Street. The building had once housed Katahdin before that restaurant’s move to Forest Avenue. A tapas place had briefly occupied the location in the aftermath of the move, and now The Little Tap House had carved out a niche for itself as a neighborhood bar with good food. I drank a soda and tried to read a little of the books with which Williamson had entrusted me. They traced the development of foliate sculpture from at least the first century AD, through its adoption by the early Church, and on to its proliferation throughout Western Europe. Some of the illustrations were more graphic than others. My server seemed particularly concerned at a capital in the cathedral at Autun which depicted a man disappearing into the jaws of a leafed face. Many of the carvings, such as a thirteenth-century mask from Bamberg cathedral, had a kind of beauty to them, which rendered them even more sinister.
I did find a source for Williamson’s Latin reference: the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus, in which Satan was described as radix omnium malorum, root of all evil, alongside a picture of a tricephalos, a three-faced demon from the façade of San Pietro in Tuscany, Italy. Coiling tendrils pushed through the mouths of the demons, extrusions from the original root, and the text described them as ‘blood-suckers’ in the context of another fifteenth-century head from Melrose Abbey. Here, too, there was a reference to the relationship between the human and plant elements in the masks as essentially hostile or parasitic, although the general consensus seemed to be that they represented a type of symbiosis, a long-term interaction and mutually benefcial relationship between two species. Man received the benefits of nature’s fruits, or the rebirth wrought by the changing of the seasons, and in return—
Well, that last part wasn’t so clear, although the cathedral at Autun with its images of consumption offered one possible realm of speculation.
I closed the books, paid my tab, and left the bar. The weather had warmed up a little since the previous night – not by much, but the weathermen were already predicting that the worst of winter was now behind us for another year, prematurely, I suspected. The sky was clear as I drove home, and the saltwater marshes smelled fresh and clean as I parked outside my house. I walked around to the back door to enter by the kitchen. It had become a habit with me ever since Rachel and Sam moved out. Entering by the front door and seeing the empty hallway was somehow more depressing than going in through the kitchen, which was where I spent most of my time anyway. I opened the door and reached out to key in the alarm code when my dead daughter spoke to me from behind. She said just one word