But when she touched my hand in that darkening room, something shot through me like a jolt of electricity and I knew that she was not lying, that somehow she heard that girl crying amid the rotting vegetation and the deep green waters, and that Tante Marie had tried to comfort her as she died.
And through Tante Marie, I heard the voices also of Susan and Jennifer, faint but distinct, and I took those voices away with me, and on a subway train a week later my wife appeared to me for the first time. That was Tante Marie's gift to me: I saw and heard my dead wife and child, and I saw and heard others too. Eventually, Tante Marie was among them. That was her gift, passed in the touch of a hand, and yet I could not explain it.
I think that it may be a kind of empathy, a capacity to experience the suffering of those who have been taken painfully, brutally, without mercy. Or perhaps what I experience is a form of madness, a product of grief and guilt; maybe I am disturbed, and in my disturbance I have imagined alternative worlds where the dead seek reparation from the living. I do not know for certain. All I can say is that those who are absent, by its means become present.
But some gifts are worse than curses, and the dark side of the gift is that they know. The lost, the stragglers, those who should not have been taken but were, the innocents, the struggling, tormented shades, the gathering ranks of the dead, they know.
And they come.
Despite my misgivings, I spent that afternoon moving from bar to bar, talking to those who had known Billy Purdue, who might have some idea of where he had gone. In some cases, the Portland police had been there before me, which usually meant that my welcome was pretty frosty. No one could, or would, tell me anything, and I had almost given up hope when I found James Hamill.
I guessed that there weren't too many forks in Hamill's family tree. He was a scrawny piece of lowlife, 120 pounds of bitterness, repressed anger and redneck mentality, the kind of guy who wouldn't willingly do someone a good turn if he could do a bad one instead. Hamill's position was pretty low down on the food chain: where he existed, they ate it raw.
He was playing alone in Old Port Billiards down on Fore Street when I came upon him, his baseball cap turned backward on his head as he lined up a shot, his scrawny mustache curled in concentration. He missed the shot and swore loudly. If the ball had been iron and the pocket magnetized, he still would have missed the shot. Hamill was just that kind of guy.
Someone in Bubba's Sulky Lounge over on Portland Street had told me that Hamill hung out with Billy Purdue on occasion. I couldn't imagine why. Maybe Billy just wanted to be with someone who could make him look good.
"James Hamill?" I asked.
He scratched his ass and offered me his hand. His smile was a dentist's nightmare.
"Pleased to meet you, whoever you are. Now go fuck yourself."
He went back to his game.
"I'm looking for Billy Purdue."
"Get in line."
"Someone else been asking after him?"
"Just about anyone with a uniform and a badge, from what I hear. You a cop?"
"Nope."
"Private?" He drew back his cue slowly, aiming to put a stripe in the center pocket.
"I guess."
"You the one he hired?"
I lifted the stripe and the cue ball went straight into the pocket.
"Hey!" said Hamill. "Gimme back my ball." He sounded like a small, spoiled child, although I figured you'd have a hard time getting any mother to claim Hamill as her own.
"Billy Purdue hired a private investigator?" I said.
My tone betrayed me, for the look of profound unhappiness disappeared from Hamill's face to be replaced by a greedy leer.
"What's it to you?"
"I'm interested in talking to anyone who can help me to trace Billy. Who's the PI?" If Hamill didn't tell me, I could probably find out by calling around, assuming that whoever he had hired would admit to working for him.
"I wouldn't want to get my amigo into trouble," said Hamill, rubbing his chin with a rough approximation of a thoughtful expression. "What's your angle?"
"I worked for his ex-wife."
"She's dead. Hope you got paid up front."
I hefted the pool ball in my hand and thought about letting fly at Hamill's head. Hamill saw the intent in my face.
"Look, I need some cash," he said, his manner softening. "Let me have something, I'll give you his name."
I took out my wallet and put a twenty on the table.
"Shit, twenty bucks," spat Hamill. "What are you, on welfare? It'll cost you more than that."
"I'll give you more. I want the name."
Hamill considered for a moment. "I don't know his first name, but he's called Wildon or Wifford or something."
"Willeford?"
"Yeah, yeah, that's it. Willeford."
I nodded my thanks and moved off.
"Hey! Hey!" shouted Hamill, and I could hear his sneakered feet shuffling across the floor behind me. "What about my extra?"
I turned back. "Sorry, I almost forgot."
I put a dime on top of the twenty and gave him a wink as I returned the ball to the table.
"That's for the crack about his ex-wife. Enjoy it in good health."
I walked away and headed for the stairs.
"Hey, Mr. Trump," shouted Hamill at my retreating back. "You hurry back now, y'hear?"
Marvin Willeford wasn't in his office, a one-desk job above an Italian restaurant across from the blue Casco Bay ferry terminal, but a handwritten sign on the door said he had gone to lunch-a long lunch, obviously. I asked in the restaurant where Willeford usually hung out and the waiter gave me the name of a waterfront bar, the Sail Loft Tavern at Commercial and Silver.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Portland harbor was a thriving center for fishing and shipping. In those days, the wharves would be piled high with lumber bound for Boston and the West Indies. There would be lumber on them again soon, but now that wood was bound for China and the Middle East. Meanwhile, the redevelopment of the harbor, the building of new condos and stores to attract the tourists and the young professionals, was still the subject of controversy. It's hard to have a proper working harbor when folks in tie-dyes and sandals are hanging around taking pictures of one another and eating snow cones. The Sail Loft looked like a throwback to the old days, the kind of place some people liked to call home.
I knew Willeford to see but I had never spoken to him and knew almost nothing about his past. He looked older than I remembered when I found him at the dark bar, watching the rerun of a basketball game on TV surrounded by sea horses and starfish on the walls. I figured he must be in his early sixties by now, jowly and bald, with a few strands of white hair flicked across his skull like seaweed on a rock. His skin was pale, almost translucent, with a fine tracery of veins at his cheeks and a bulbous red nose pitted with craters, like a relief map of Mars. His features seemed misty and inexact, as if they were slowly dissolving into the alcohol that coursed through his system, gradually becoming blurred versions of their original form.
He held a beer in one hand, an empty shot glass beside it, and the remains of a sandwich and potato chips lay on a plate before him as he watched the screen above the bar. He didn't slouch at the bar, though; he sat tall and straight, leaning slightly into the rest at the back of the chair.
"Hi," I said as I took a seat beside him. "Marvin Willeford?"