"Then I heard from behind me the sound of the nurses. They brought with them the fat guard, the one Miss Emily hit on the night she ran off, and I was bundled out of the room while they took the boy away. I watched him as they took him, Mr. Parker, and his face… Oh, his face was like he had seen someone die, someone he loved. He cried and called out again, 'Momma, Momma,' but she did not reply.
"The police arrived, and they took the boy away. A nurse, she came to Miss Emily and she asked her if it was true, what the boy had said. And Miss Emily told her, 'No,' that she does not know what he is talking about, that she has no son, no child.
"But that night, I heard her crying for so long that I thought she would never stop. I went to her and held her. I told her that it was okay, that she was safe, but she said only one thing."
She paused and I saw that her hands were shaking. I reached out and stilled them and she moved her right hand, slipping it over mine and holding it tightly, her eyes closed. And I think, for a moment, I became her son, her child, one of those who never visited and who had left her to die in the cold north as surely as if they had hauled her into the forests of Piscataquis or Aroostook and abandoned her there. Her eyes reopened and she released my hand. Her own hands were still once again when she did so.
"Mrs. Schneider," I said gently. "What did she say?"
"She said: 'Now he will kill me.'"
"Who did she mean? Billy, the young man who came to her?" But I think I already knew the real answer.
Mrs. Schneider shook her head. "No, the other. The one she was always afraid would find her, and nobody could help her, or save her from him."
In her words, I heard the echo of other words, words heard in a dream on a dark night, words whispered to me by someone who no longer had a voice.
"It was the one who came later," concluded the old woman. "He learned of what had happened, and he came."
I waited. Something brushed softly against the window and I watched a snowflake drift down the pane, melting as it went. "It was the night before she ran away. It was cold that night. I remember, I had to ask for an extra blanket, it was so cold. When I woke, it was dark, black, with no moon. And I heard a noise, a scraping from outside.
"I climbed from my bed and the floor was so chilly that I-ah!-I gasped. I went to the window and drew the curtain a little, but I could see nothing. Then the sound came again, and I looked straight down and…"
She was terrified. I could feel it coming off her in waves, a deep abiding fear that had shaken her to her core.
"There was a man, Mr. Parker, and he was climbing up the pipe, hand over hand. His head was down, and turned away from me, so I could not see him. And, anyway, it was so dark that he was only a shadow. But the shadow reached the window of Miss Emily's room and I could see him pushing at it with one hand, trying to force it up. I heard Miss Emily scream, and I screamed too, and ran into the hallway calling for a nurse. And all the time, I can hear Miss Emily screaming and screaming. But when they came, the man was gone and they could find no trace of him in the grounds."
"What kind of man was he, Mrs. Schneider? Tall? Short? Big? Small?"
"I told you: it was dark. I could not see clearly." She shook her head in distress as she tried to remember.
"Could it have been Billy?"
"No." She was definite about that. "It was the wrong shape. It was not as big as him." She lifted her hands in imitation of Billy's large shoulders. "When I told Dr. Ryley about the man, I think he believed that I was imagining things, that we were two old women frightening each other. But we were not. Mr. Parker, I could not see this man clearly, but I could feel him. He was no thief come to steal from old women. He wanted something else. He wanted to hurt Miss Emily, to punish her for something she did long ago. The boy Billy, the boy who called her 'Momma,' he started something by coming here. Perhaps, Mr. Parker, I started it, by calling this man Willeford. Perhaps it is all my fault."
"No, Mrs. Schneider," I said. "Whatever happened to cause this started a long time ago."
She looked at me then with a kind of tenderness before she reached out and laid a hand softly on my knee to emphasize what she said next. "She was afraid, Mr. Parker," she whispered. "She was so afraid that she wanted to die."
I left her, alone with her memories and her guilt. Winter, the thief of daylight, caused lights to twinkle in the distance as Martel and I walked to our cars.
"Did you learn anything?" he asked.
I didn't reply immediately, but thought back on all that I had learned. In my mind, I saw newspaper reports of the disturbance at the home and heard the gossip of locals as they spoke of the man who had come looking for his lost mother. And their whispers traveled north on the wind, into the forest, into the wilderness.
"Could a man survive out there?" I asked Martel at last.
Martel's brow furrowed. "Depends on how long he's out there, what kind of clothing and supplies-"
"That's not what I mean," I interrupted. "Could he survive for a long time, for years, maybe?"
Martel thought for a moment. When he spoke, he didn't mock the question but answered it seriously, and he rose in my estimation for doing so. "I don't see why not. People have been surviving out there since the country was settled. There are still the remains of farmhouses to prove it. It wouldn't be an easy existence, and I guess he'd have to go back to civilization once in a while, but it could be done."
"And no one would disturb him out there?"
"Most of it hasn't been touched in the best part of fifty years. Go far enough into the forest and not even hunters or wardens are likely to bother you. You think someone went in there?"
"Yes, I do." I shook his hand and opened the door of the Mustang. "Trouble is, I think he's come out again."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I had the scent of him then, had begun to feel the knowledge of him creep over me, but I needed more if I was to understand him, if I was to hunt him down before he found Billy Purdue, before he killed again. I was so close to making the connection: it hung just beyond my reach like the name of a half-remembered melody. I needed someone who could take my own half-formed suspicions and mold them into a coherent whole, and I knew of only one person whom I trusted that much.
I needed to talk to Rachel Wolfe.
I drove back to Dark Hollow, packed an overnight bag and placed the file on Caleb Kyle at the top. Louis and Angel returned in their separate cars as I was leaving. I explained what I was doing then started to drive to Bangor to catch the flight to Boston.
I was just outside Guilford when, three cars ahead of me, I spotted a yellow Ford truck, its exhaust belching dirty fumes onto the road. I accelerated past it, glancing idly at the driver as I did so. In the cab sat the old man who had threatened me with his shotgun. I stayed ahead of him for a time, then pulled into a gas station at Dover-Foxcroft to let him pass. I stayed four or five cars behind him all the way to Orono, where he drove into the parking lot of a run-down mall and stopped outside a store called "Stuckey Trading." I checked my watch. If I delayed any longer, I'd miss my flight. I watched the old man as he removed a couple of black sacks from the bed of his truck and headed into the store, then I slapped the steering wheel once in frustration and accelerated toward Bangor and the airport.
I knew that Rachel Wolfe was holding tutorials at Harvard while the college funded research she was conducting into the link between abnormal brain structures and criminal behavior. She no longer engaged in private practice and, as far as I knew, was no longer assisting with criminal profiling.
Rachel had acted as an unofficial adviser on a number of cases for the NYPD, including the Traveling Man killings. That was how I met her, how we became lovers, and it was what eventually tore us apart. Rachel, whose policeman brother had died at the hands of a disturbed gunman, believed that by exploring the criminal mind she could prevent the same thing happening to others. But the Traveling Man's mind had been unlike any other, and the hunt for him had almost cost Rachel her life. She had made it known that she did not wish to see me, and until recently, I had respected that wish. I did not want to cause her any more pain, yet now I felt that I had nowhere else to turn.