"I don't know," I said.
But I did know.
It took me three knocks to get Angel to the door. He stood shivering as I told him about the cat, Louis behind him listening silently.
"He's here," said Louis, finally.
"We don't know that for sure," I replied, but I knew he was right. Somewhere close by, Stritch was waiting.
I left them and walked across to the diner. It was ten after eight, and it was already almost full, warm air circulating with the smell of fresh coffee and bacon, voices raised at the counter and in the kitchen. For the first time, I noticed the Christmas decorations, the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, the tinsel and the stars. It would be my second season without them. I felt almost grateful for Billy Purdue, maybe even for Ellen Cole, for giving me something on which to concentrate my mind. All of the energy I might have poured into grieving, into anger and guilt, into fearing the anniversary, I now put into the search for these two people. But that gratitude was a brief, passing thing, an ugly betrayal of the people involved, and I quickly felt disgusted with myself for using someone else's sufferings to alleviate my own.
I took a booth and watched the people passing by. When the waitress came, I ordered only coffee. The sight of the cat and the thought of Stritch trailing us had ruined my appetite. I found myself closely examining the faces of the people in the diner, as if Stritch might somehow have mutated himself, or stolen their form. There were a couple of timber company men across from me, eating plates of ham and eggs and already talking about Gary Chute.
I listened and learned, for the world of the northern wilderness was on the verge of change. An area of almost one hundred thousand acres of forest, owned by a European paper company, was about to be harvested. The area had last been logged in the thirties and forties and now it had matured again. For the last decade, the company had been restoring roads and bridges in preparation for the big lumber trucks with their claw-shaped hydraulic lifts that would move into the wilderness, enabling the transportation of the pine, spruce and fir, the maple and birch, to begin. Chute, a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono, was one of those responsible for checking the roads, the tree growth and the likely boundaries for the logging.
The laws relating to forestry had changed since the last cutting. Then, the companies had cleared all of the land, causing silting that killed fish, displaced animals and led to serious erosion. Now they were obliged to cut in a checkerboard pattern, leaving half the forest for another twenty to thirty years so that the habitats could grow again. Already there were signs of early cuts, where the deer and moose would feed on the raspberries, willow and alders that sprang up to fight for the new light. And so the days of the undisturbed northern wilderness were now numbered, and soon men and machines would be making their way into its vastness. Gary Chute had been the first of many, and it struck me that his job must have taken him into areas where few people had set foot in decades.
Across the street, Lorna Jennings stepped from her green Nissan, wearing a white padded jacket buttoned and tied over black denims and black, calf-length boots. I wondered how long she had been there: there were no exhaust fumes around the car, and despite the fact that there was little traffic on the street, the tracks of her tires had been crossed by a number of other vehicles.
She stood at the curb, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and looked over at the diner. Her eyes moved along the windows until they came to where I sat, a mug of coffee in my hand. She seemed to consider me for a moment, then walked across the road, entered the diner and took a seat opposite me, unbuttoning her jacket as she sat. Beneath it, she wore a red, turtleneck sweater that tightly followed the sweep of her breasts. One or two people looked over at her as she sat, and words were exchanged.
"You're attracting attention," I said.
She blushed slightly. "The hell with them," she said. She wore a trace of pink lipstick and her hair hung loose to the nape of her neck, strands falling gently near her left eye like dark feathers from a bird's wing. "Some of them know you were out there last night, when they found the body. People have been asking why you're here."
She ordered, and a waitress brought her coffee and a bagel, with some thin slices of bacon on a separate plate, then gave each of us a sly look before stepping away. Lorna ate the bagel unbuttered, holding it in her left hand while her right picked up pieces of bacon that she nibbled at daintily.
"And what answer have they got?"
"They've heard that you're looking for a girl. Now they're trying to figure out if you had any reason to be interested in the disappearance of the timber company man." She stopped and took a sip of coffee. "Well, have you?"
"Is that you asking, or Rand?"
She grimaced. "You know that's a low blow," she said quietly. "Rand can ask his own questions."
I shrugged. "I don't think Chute's death was accidental, but that's for the ME to confirm and I don't see any connection between him and Ellen Cole." That wasn't completely true. They were connected by Dark Hollow and the dark line of a road drawn through the wilderness upon which Chute's death hung like a single red bead.
"But there have been other deaths as well, some of them tied up with a guy called Billy Purdue. He was one of Meade Payne's boys, once upon a time."
"You think he might be here?"
"I think he might try to get to Payne. There are people after him, bad people. He took money that didn't belong to him and now he's running scared. I think Meade Payne is one of the only people left whom he can trust."
"And where do you fit in?"
"I was doing some work for his wife. Ex-wife. Her name was Rita Ferris. She had a son."
Lorna's brow furrowed, then her eyes closed briefly and she nodded as she remembered the name. "The woman and child who died in Portland, that was them, wasn't it? And this Billy Purdue, he was her ex-husband?"
"Uh-huh, that's them."
"They say he killed his own family."
"They say wrong."
She was silent for a time, then said: "You seem very sure of that."
"He wasn't the kind."
"And do you know 'the kind?'" She was watching me carefully now. There were conflicting emotions in her eyes. I could sense them coming from her, just as I had sensed the snow falling softly in the night. There was curiosity, and pity, and something else, too, something that had lain dormant for many years, a feeling repressed and now gradually being released. It made me want to draw back from her. Some things were best left in the past.
"Yes, I do. I know the kind."
"You know, because you've killed them."
I waited a heartbeat before I answered. "Yes."
"Is that what you do now?"
I smiled emptily. "It seems to be part of it."
"Did they deserve to die?"
"They didn't deserve to live."
"That's not the same thing."
"I realize that."
"Rand knows all about you," she said, pushing away the remains of her food. "He spoke about you last night. Actually, he shouted about you, and I shouted back." She sipped her coffee. "I think he's afraid of you." She looked out on to the street, refusing to look directly at me and instead staring at my reflection in the glass. "I know what he did to you, in that men's room. I always knew. I'm sorry."
"I was young. I healed."
She turned back to me. "I didn't," she said. "But I couldn't leave him, not then. I still loved him, or thought I did. And I was young enough to believe that we had a chance together. We tried to have children. We thought it might make things better. I lost two, Bird, the last one only a year ago. I don't think I can carry to term. I was so useless, I couldn't even give him a child." She tensed her lips, and brushed her hair back from her forehead. There was a deadness about her eyes.