Meade Payne lived in a red wood house overlooking Ragged Lake. A long, poorly kept driveway wound up to the yard, where a Dodge pickup was parked, old and partially eaten by rust. There were no chairs on the porch and no dog barked as I drew the Mustang up alongside the truck.
I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I was about to go around to the back of the house when the door opened and a man peered out. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, I guessed, with dark hair and sallow, windblown skin. There was a hardness about him, and his hands were tough and pitted with scars across the backs of the fingers. He wore no rings, no watch and his clothes looked like they didn't fit him quite as well as they should. His shirt was a little too tight on his shoulders and chest, his jeans a little too short, revealing heavy wool socks above black, steel-toed shoes.
"Help you?" he said, in a tone of voice that indicated that, even if he could, he'd prefer not to.
"I'm looking for Meade Payne."
"Why?"
"I want to talk to him about a boy he fostered once. Is Mr. Payne around?"
"I don't know you," he said. For no reason, his tone was becoming belligerent.
I kept my temper. "I'm not from around these parts. I've come from Portland. It's important that I talk to him."
The young man considered what I had said, then left me to wait in the snow as he closed the door behind him. A few minutes later, an elderly man appeared from the side of the house. He was slightly bent over and walked slowly, shuffling a little as if the joints in his knees hurt him, but I guessed that he might once have been close to my own height, maybe even six feet. He wore a pair of dungarees over a red check shirt and dirty white sneakers. A Chicago Bears cap was pulled down low on his head and wisps of gray hair tried to escape from beneath the rim. His eyes were bright blue and very clear. He kept his hands in his pockets and looked me over, his head slightly to one side, as if trying to place me from somewhere.
"I'm Meade Payne. What can I do for you?"
"My name's Charlie Parker. I'm a private investigator out of Portland. It's about a boy you fostered some years back: Billy Purdue."
His eyes widened a little as I said the name and he waved me in the direction of a pair of old rocking chairs that stood at the end of the porch. Before I sat down, he took a rag from his pocket and carefully cleaned the seat. "Sorry, but I don't get many visitors. Always tried to discourage them, mostly for the sake of the boys."
"I'm not sure I understand."
He indicated the house with a movement of his chin. His skin was still quite taut, its color a reddish brown. "Some of the boys I fostered down the years, they were troublesome types. They needed a firm hand to guide them and they needed to be kept away from temptations. Out here "-he waved a hand toward the lake and the trees-"only temptations are hunting rabbits and jacking off. I don't know how kindly the Lord takes to either, but I don't reckon they count for much in the great scheme of things."
"When did you stop fostering?"
"Back a ways," he said, but added nothing more. Instead, he reached out a hand and rapped a long finger on the arm of my chair. "Now, Mr. Parker, you tell me: is Billy in some kind of trouble?"
I told him as much as I felt that I could: that his wife and child had been killed; that he might be a suspect in the killings but that I didn't think that he was; that certain people outside the law believed that he might have stolen some money belonging to them and they would hurt him to get it back. The old man listened silently to all that I said. The hostile young man leaned on the frame of the open door, watching us.
"Do you know where Billy might be now?" he asked.
"I was hoping you might have some idea."
"I ain't seen him, if that's what you're asking," he said. "And if he comes to me, I can't say as I'll hand him over to anyone, 'less I'm sure he'll get a fair hearing."
Out on the lake, a motor boat was moving through the waters. Birds flew from its path, but they were too far away to identify.
"There may be something more to this," I said, weighing carefully what I was going to say next. "You remember Cheryl Lansing?"
"I recall her."
"She's dead. She was murdered along with her daughter-in-law. I'm not sure how long ago; certainly only a few days. If there's a connection to Billy Purdue, then you could be in danger."
The old man shook his head gently. He pinched his lips with his fingers and said nothing for a time. Then: "I appreciate you taking the time to come up here, Mr. Parker, but, like I said, I ain't heard from Billy and, if I do, I'll have to think long and hard about what to do next. As for being in danger, I can handle a gun and I've got the boy with me."
"Your son?"
"Caspar. Cas, to them what knows him. We can look out for each other and I don't fear no man, Mr. Parker."
There didn't seem to be anything more I could say. I gave Meade Payne the number of my cell phone and he stuffed it into one of the pockets of his dungarees. He shook my hand and walked slowly, stiffly, back to the door, humming softly to himself. It was an old song, I thought. I seemed to recall it from somewhere but couldn't place it, something about tender ladies and a handsome gambler and memories haunting the mind. I found myself whistling a little of it as, through the rearview, I saw Caspar help the old man into the house. Neither of them looked back as I drove away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Back in Dark Hollow, I stopped off at the diner and went through the phone book. I got Rand Jennings's address and the chef gave me directions to his house. Rand and Lorna lived about two miles out of town, in a two-story house painted yellow and black with a neat garden and a black fence at its boundary. Smoke rose from the chimney. Behind the house, a river ran from the lakes to the west of town. I slowed as I drove by, but didn't stop. I wasn't even sure why I was there: old memories stirred up, I supposed. I still felt something for Lorna, I knew, although it wasn't love. I think, and I had no reason to feel it, that it was a kind of sorrow for her. Then I turned back to head south for Greenville.
I found the Greenville Police Department at the town's Municipal Building on Minden Street, where it occupied an unattractive tan-sided office with green shutters and Christmas wreaths on the windows in an effort to make it look prettier. There was a fire department office close by, and a police car and a green Department of Conservation forest ranger truck in the lot.
Inside, I gave my name to a pair of cheerful secretaries, then took a seat on a bench across from the door. After twenty minutes, a stocky man with dark hair and a mustache and brown, watchful eyes came out of an office down the hall, his blue uniform neatly pressed, and extended his hand in greeting.
"Sorry for keeping you waiting," he said. "We have a contract for policing Beaver Cove. I've been out there most of the day. My name's Dave Martel. I'm chief of police."
At Martel's instigation, we left the police building and walked past the Union Evangelical Church to the Hard Drive Café at Sanders Store. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot across the street, the white hull of the steamboat Katahdin looming behind them. A mist hung over the lake and created a white wall at the end of the street through which cars occasionally burst. Inside the café, we ordered French vanilla coffee and took a seat close by one of the computer terminals that folks used to pick up their e-mail.
"I knew your granddaddy," said Martel, as we waited for the coffee to arrive. Sometimes it was easy to forget how close the ties still were in parts of the state. "Knew Bob Warren from back in Portland, when I was a boy. He was a good man."
"You been here long?"
"Ten years now."
"Like it?"
"Sure. This is an unusual place. You got a lot of people in this part of the country who don't care much for the law, who've maybe come up here because they don't like being regulated. Funny thing is, here they've got me, they've got the game wardens, they've got the county sheriff and the state police all keeping an eye on 'em. Mostly we get along just fine but, still, enough things happen to keep me busy."