I nodded. I knew how he could be. "When you get back, call Special Agent Ross in the FBI's Manhattan office. Mention my name. He'll make sure that Ellen's name is in the NCIC database." The National Crime Information Center kept records of all missing persons, adults and juveniles, reported to the police. "If it isn't, it means that the police aren't doing what they should be doing, and Ross may be able to help you with that as well."
She brightened up a little. "I'll ask Walter to do it."
"Does he know you're here?"
"No. When I asked him to contact you, he refused. He's already been up there, trying to put pressure on the local police. They told him that the best thing to do would be to wait, but that's not Walter. He drove around, asking in the other towns, but there was no sign. He got back yesterday, but I don't think he's going to stay. I told him I had to get out of the house for a while, and that my sister would stay by the phone. I had the flight already booked. I'd tried calling you on the cell phone, but I could never seem to get through. So I came up here, and the police in Scarborough told me where you lived. I don't know…" She trailed off, then began again. "I don't know all that happened between you and Walter. I know some of it and I can guess at more, but it has nothing to do with my daughter. I left him a note on the refrigerator. He'll have found it by now." She stared out the window, as if visualizing the discovery of the note and Walter's response to its contents.
"Is there any chance that the police might be right, that she has run away?" I asked. "She never seemed like that kind of kid and she didn't seem troubled at all when I met her, but people get funny sometimes when love enters the equation."
She smiled for the first time. "I remember what that feels like. I may be older than you, but I'm not dead yet." The smile disappeared as her words set off a chain reaction in her head, and I knew she was trying not to picture what might have happened to Ellen. "She didn't run away. I know her and she would never do that to us, no matter how badly we had fought with her."
"What about the kid-Ricky? I get the impression that their eyes met from opposite sides of the track."
Lee didn't seem to know much about Ricky beyond the fact that his mother had left the family when he was three and his father had raised him and his three sisters by holding down two dead-end jobs. He was a scholarship student-a little rough and ready, she admitted, but she didn't believe that there was any malice in him or that he would have been party to some elopement.
"Will you look for her, Bird? I keep thinking that she's in trouble somewhere. Maybe they went hiking and something went wrong, or somebody…" She stopped abruptly and reached out to take my hand. "Will you find her for me?" she repeated.
I thought of Billy Purdue and of the men hunting him, of Rita and Donald, of a hand emerging from a mass of wet, rotting leaves. I felt a duty to the dead, to the troubled young woman who had wanted to create a better life for herself and her child, but she was gone and Billy Purdue was drifting toward some kind of reckoning from which I couldn't save him. Maybe my duty now was to the living, to Ellen, who had looked after my little girl for the brief span of her life.
"I'll look for her," I said. "You want to tell me where she was going when she made the call?"
As she spoke, the world seemed to shift on its axis, throwing strange shadows across familiar scenes, turning everything into an off-kilter version of its former self. And I cursed Billy Purdue because, somehow, in some way that I couldn't yet comprehend, he was responsible for what had happened. In Lee's words, once-distant worlds eclipsed one another and indistinct shapes, like plates moving beneath the earth, came together to form a new, dark continent.
"She said she was heading for a place called Dark Hollow."
I brought her to the Portland Jetport in time to catch her flight to New York, then drove back to the house. Angel and Louis were in the front room, watching a sleazy talk show marathon on cable.
"It's 'I Can't Marry You, You're Not a Virgin,'" said Angel. "At least they're not claiming to be virgins, else it'd be 'I Can't Marry You, You're a Liar.'"
"Or 'I Can't Marry You, You're Ugly,'" offered Louis, sipping a bottle of Katahdin ale, his feet stretched out before him on a chair. "Man, how they get the freaks for this show? They trawl the crowds at truck pulls?" He hit the remote, muting the sound on the TV.
"How's Lee doing?" asked Angel, suddenly serious.
"She's holding together, but only just."
"So what's the deal?"
"I've got to head north again, and I think I'm going to need you two to come with me. Ellen Cole was last heard from on the way to Dark Hollow, the same place Billy Purdue grew up, for a time, and the place I think he's heading back to now."
Louis shrugged. "Then that's where we going,"
I sat down in an easy chair beside him. "There may be a problem."
"Jeez, Bird," said Angel, "we're not exactly starved for problems as it is."
"This problem have a name?" asked Louis.
"Rand Jennings."
"And he would be?"
"Chief of police in Dark Hollow."
"And he doesn't like you because?" said Angel, taking up the baton from Louis.
"I had an affair with his wife."
"You the man," said Louis. "You could fall over and make hitting the ground look complicated."
"It was a long time ago."
"Long enough for Rand Jennings to forgive and forget?" asked Angel.
"Probably not."
"Maybe you could write him a note," he suggested. "Or send him flowers."
"You're not being helpful."
"I didn't sleep with his wife. In the helpful stakes, that puts me a full length clear of you."
"You see him last time you were up there?" asked Louis.
"No."
"You see the woman?"
"Yes."
Angel laughed. "You're some piece of work, Bird. Any chance you might keep the mouse in its hole while we're up there, or you planning to renew old acquaintances?"
"We met by accident. It wasn't intentional."
"Uh-huh. Tell that to Rand Jennings. 'Hi Rand, it was an accident. I tripped and fell into your wife.'" I could still hear him laughing as he headed for his bedroom.
Louis finished his beer, then lifted his feet from the chair and prepared to follow Angel. "We screwed up tonight," he said.
"Things got screwed up. We did what we could."
"Tony Celli ain't gonna give up on this thing. Stritch neither."
"I know."
"You want to tell me what happened on the top floor?"
"I felt him waiting, Louis. I felt him waiting and I knew for sure that if I went in after him, I'd die. Despite evidence to the contrary, I don't have a death wish. I wasn't going to die at his hands, not there, not anywhere."
Louis remained at the door, considering what I had told him. "If you felt it, then that's the way it was," he said at last. "Sometimes, that's all the difference there is between living and dying. But if I see him again, I'm taking him down."
"Not if I see him first." I meant it, regardless of all that had taken place and the fear that I had felt.
His mouth twitched in one of his trademark semismiles.
"Bet you a dollar you don't."
"Fifty cents," I replied. "You've already earned half your fee."
"I guess I have," he said. "I guess I have."
Louis and Angel left early the next morning, Louis for the airport and Angel to scout around Billy Purdue's trailer to see if he could find anything that the cops might have missed. I was about to lock up the house when Ellis Howard's car bumped into my drive and then Ellis himself stepped heavily from the car. He took a look at my bag and gestured at it with a thumb.