"Can I help you?" said the woman. Her face was neutral but her voice had the same tone as the young man at Meade Payne's place. It made "help" sound like a dirty word. The way she said "you" wasn't much better.
I gave her my name and told her that Chief Martel had called ahead to arrange for me to talk to someone about the death of Emily Watts.
"I'm sorry, but Dr. Ryley, the director, is at a meeting in Augusta until tomorrow." She sounded superficially pleasant, but her face told me that anyone asking about Emily Watts was about as welcome as Louis Farrakhan at a Klan dinner. "I told the chief, but you'd already left." Now her face matched her tone, with the addition of a look of malicious amusement at the trip I'd been forced to make unnecessarily.
"Let me guess," I said. "You can't let me talk to anyone without the director's permission, the director isn't here and you have no way of contacting him."
"Exactly."
"Happy to save you the trouble of saying it."
She bristled and gripped her pen tightly, as if in preparation for ramming it into my eye. From out of the security booth stepped a pudgy guy in a cheap, badly fitting uniform. He pulled on his hat as he walked toward me, but not quickly enough to hide the scars at the side of his head.
"Everything okay here, Glad?" he asked the woman behind the desk. Glad: some people were just like a big finger raised to the universe.
"Now I am scared," I said. "Big security man and no old lady to protect me."
He blushed a deep red and sucked in his stomach a little.
"I think you'd better leave. Like she said, there's nobody here who can help you."
I nodded and pointed to his belt. "I see you got a new gun. Maybe you should get a lock and chain for it. A passing child might try to steal it."
I left them in the reception area and walked back into the grounds. I felt a little petty for picking on Judd but I was tired and antsy and the mention of the name Caleb Kyle after all those years had thrown me. I stood on the grass and looked up at the stained, unlovely facade of the home. Emily Watts's room was at the western corner, top floor, according to Martel. The drapes were drawn and there were bird droppings on the window ledge. In the room beside it, a figure moved at the window and an elderly woman, her hair pulled back in a bun, watched me. I smiled at her but she didn't respond. When I drove away, I could see her in the rearview, still standing at the window, still watching.
I had planned to stay another day in Dark Hollow, since I hadn't yet spoken to Rand Jennings. The sight of his wife had stirred up feelings in me that had been submerged for a long time: anger, regret, the embers of some old desire. I remembered the humiliation of lying on the toilet floor as Jennings's kicks rained down on me, his fat friend snickering as he held the door closed. It surprised me, but part of me still wanted a confrontation with him after all that time.
On my way back to the motel I tried to call Angel using the cell phone but I seemed to be out of range. I called him instead from a gas station, where I was told that Dark Hollow was a virtual black spot for cell phone communications due to ongoing problems with trees and aerials. The newly installed telephone in the Scarborough house rang five times before he eventually picked up.
"Yeah?"
"It's Bird. What's happening?"
"Lots, none of it good. While you've been doing your Perry Mason thing up north, Billy Purdue was spotted in a convenience store down here. He got away before the cops could pick him up but he's still in the city, somewhere."
"He won't be for long, now that he's been seen. What about Tony Celli?"
"Nothing, but the cops found the Coupe De Ville in an old barn out by Westbrook. Louis picked it up on the police band. Looks like the freak show ditched his wheels for something less showy."
I was about to tell him what little I had learned when he interrupted.
"There's something else. You got a visitor here, arrived this morning,"
"Who is it?"
"Lee Cole."
I was surprised, given the deterioration of my friendship with her husband. Maybe she had hopes of rebuilding bridges between Walter and me, but that didn't seem a good enough reason to track me down in Maine.
"Did she say what she wanted?"
There was a hesitation in Angel's voice, and I immediately felt my stomach turn. "Kinda. Bird, her daughter Ellen is missing."
I drove back immediately, doing a steady eighty as soon as I hit I-95. I was almost on the outskirts of Portland when the cell phone rang. I picked it up, half expecting it to be Angel again. It wasn't.
"Parker?" I recognized the voice almost immediately.
"Billy? Where are you?"
Billy Purdue's voice was panicky and scared. "I'm in trouble, man. My wife, she trusted you, and now I'm trusting you too. I didn't kill them, Parker. I wouldn't do that. I couldn't kill her. I couldn't kill my little boy."
"I know, Billy, I know." As we spoke, I kept repeating his name in an effort to calm him and develop whatever tentative trust he might have toward me. I tried to put Ellen Cole out of my mind, at least for the present. I would deal with that as soon as I could.
"The cops are after me. They think I killed 'em. I loved 'em. I'd never have hurt 'em. I just wanted to keep 'em." His voice bubbled on the edge of hysteria.
"Okay, Billy," I said. "Look, tell me where you are and I'll come and get you. We'll take you somewhere safe and we can talk this thing through."
"There was an old guy at their place, Parker. I saw him watching it, that night the cops picked me up. I was trying to look out for them, but I couldn't." I wasn't even sure that he had heard my offer of help, but I let him talk as I drove past the Falmouth exit about three miles from the city.
"Did you recognize him, Billy?"
"No, I never seen him before, but I'd know him if I saw him again."
"Okay, Billy, that's good. Now tell me where you are and I'll come and get you."
"I'm at a phone box on Commercial, but I can't stay here. There's people, cars. I've been hiding out in the Portland Company complex at Fore Street, down by the locomotive museum. There's a vacant building just inside the main entrance. You know it?"
"Yeah, I know it. Go back inside. I'll be there as soon as I can."
I called Angel again and told him to meet me, with Louis, at the corner of India and Commercial. Lee Cole was to be left at Java Joe's. I didn't want her at the house in case Tony Celli, or anyone else, decided to pay a visit.
There was no one else around when I arrived at the corner of India and Commercial. I pulled into the parking lot of the old India Street Terminal at One India, the car nestling in the shadow of the old three-story building. As I stepped from the car, the first drops of rain began to fall, a heavy, skin-soaking volley that exploded dramatically on the hood of the car and left splashes the size of quarters on the windshield. I walked around the terminal, past a picnic table and a single-story office building, painted red, until I was on the harbor side, looking out over the dark waters. Thunder rumbled, and on Casco Bay, a ship was frozen in a flash of lightning. Ahead of me, on a restored stretch of line used to give tourists a taste of a narrow-gauge railway, stood a flatbed car with a storage tank on top, marking the start of the line. A row of locked cargo containers was ranged behind the car. To my right was the Casco Bay ferry terminal, the dinosaur body of a blue eighteen-ton crane standing above it on four spindly legs like a mutilated bug.