Something caught in my throat at the memory of Donald, and I didn't speak again until we reached the square. I put out my hand to Rachel. I didn't kiss her because I didn't feel that I had the right. She took my hand and held it tightly.
"Bird, this man feels he has some dispensation to avenge himself on anyone who crosses him because he believes that he's been wronged. I've just labeled him as psychopathic." In her eyes, there was concern, and more.
"In other words, what's my excuse?" I smiled, but it went no deeper than my mouth.
"They're gone, Bird. Susan and Jennifer are dead, and what happened to them and to you was a terrible, terrible thing. But every time you make someone pay for what was done to you, you hurt yourself and you risk becoming the thing you hate. Do you understand?"
"It's not about me, Rachel," I replied softly. "At least, not entirely. Someone has to stop these people. Someone has to take responsibility." There was that echo again.
they are all your responsibility.
Her hand moved gently over mine, her fingers on my fingers, her thumb rubbing lightly on my palm, then she touched my face with her free hand. "Why did you come here? Most of what I told you, you could have figured out for yourself."
"I'm not that smart."
"Don't bullshit a bullshitter."
"So it's true what they say about psychologists."
"Only the New Age ones. You're avoiding the question."
"I know. You're right: some of it I had guessed, or half-guessed, but I needed to hear it back from someone else, otherwise I was afraid that I was going crazy. But I'm also here because I still care about you, because when you walked away you took something from me. I thought that this might be a way of getting closer to you. I wanted to see you again. Maybe, deep down, that's all it was." I looked away from her.
Her grip tightened on my hand. "I saw what you did, back in Louisiana. You didn't go there to find the Traveling Man. You went there to kill him, and anyone who stood in your way got hurt, and got hurt badly. Your capacity for inflicting violence scared me. You scared me."
"I didn't know what else to do, not then."
"And now?"
I was about to answer when her finger touched the scar on my cheek, the mark left by Billy Purdue's blade. "How did this happen?" she asked.
"A man stuck a knife blade in me."
"And what did you do?"
I paused before answering. "I walked away."
"Who was he?"
"Billy Purdue."
Her eyes widened, and it was as if something that had been curled inside her to protect itself gradually began to unfurl. I could see it in her, could feel it in her touch.
"He never had a chance, Rachel. The odds were stacked against him from the start."
"If I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly?" she said.
"I've always tried to be honest with you," I replied.
She nodded. "I know, but this is important. I need to be sure of this."
"Ask."
"Do you need the violence?"
I thought about the question. In the past, I had been motivated by personal revenge. I had hurt people, had killed people, because of what had been done to Susan and to Jennifer, and to me. Now that desire for revenge had dwindled, easing a little every day, and the spaces it left as it receded were filled with the potential for reparation. I bore some responsibility for what happened to Susan and Jennifer. I didn't think that I would ever come to terms with that knowledge, but I could try to make up for it in some small way, to acknowledge my failings in the past by using them to make the present better.
"I did, for a time," I admitted.
"And now?"
"I don't need it, but I will use it if I have to. I won't stand by and watch innocent people being hurt."
Rachel leaned over and kissed me gently on the cheek. Her eyes were soft when she pulled away.
"So you're the avenging angel," she said.
"Something like that," I replied.
"Good-bye, then, avenging angel," Rachel whispered softly.
She turned and walked away, back to the library and her work. She didn't look back, but her head was down and I could feel the weight of her thoughts.
The plane rose from Logan, heading upward and north through the cold air, heavy cloud surrounding it like the breath of God. I thought of Sheriff Tannen, who had promised to hunt up the most recent pictures available of Caleb Kyle. They would be thirty years old, but at least they would be something. I took the blurred newspaper photo of Caleb from my grandfather's folder and looked at it again and again. He was like a skeleton slowly being fleshed out, as if the process of decay were being gradually, irrevocably reversed. A figure that had been little more than a name, a shape glimpsed in the shadows, was assuming an objective reality.
I know you, I thought. I know you.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I arrived in Bangor early that afternoon, picked up my car in the airport parking lot and started back for Dark Hollow. I felt like I was being pulled in ten different directions, yet somehow each one seemed to lead me back to the same place, to the same conclusion, by different routes: Caleb Kyle had come back. He had killed a girl in Texas shortly after his release from prison, probably as an act of revenge against a whole community. Then he had assumed his mother's name and headed north, far north, eventually losing himself in the wilderness.
If Emily Watts had told the truth to Mrs. Schneider-and there was no reason to doubt her-then she had given birth to a child and hidden it because she believed its father to be a killer of young women, and sensed that this man wanted the child for his own purposes. The leap required was to accept that this child might be Billy Purdue, and that his father could be Caleb Kyle.
Meanwhile, Ellen Cole and her boyfriend were still missing, as was Willeford. Tony Celli had gone to ground, but was undoubtedly still searching for some trace of Billy. He had no choice: if he did not find Billy, he would be unable to replace the money he had lost and he would be killed as an example to others. I had a suspicion that it was already too late for Tony Clean, that it had been too late from the very moment that he had purchased the securities, maybe even from the time when the thought of using someone else's money to secure his future first crossed his mind. Tony would do whatever he had to do to track Billy down, but everything he did, all of the violence he inflicted and all of the attention it drew to himself and his masters, made it less and less likely that he would be allowed to live. He was like a man who, trapped in the darkness of a tunnel, focuses his mind on the only illumination he sees before him, unaware that what he believes to be the light of salvation is, in reality, the fire that will consume him.
There were other reasons, too, to be fearful. Somewhere in the darkness, Stritch waited. I imagined that he still wanted the money but, more than that, he wanted revenge for the death of his partner. I thought of the dead man in the Portland complex, violated in his last moments by Stritch's foulness, and I thought too of the fear that I had felt, the certainty that I could have allowed death to embrace me in those shadows if I had chosen to do so.
There remained also the old man in the forest. There was still the chance that he knew something more than he had told me, that his remark about the two young people was based on more than gossip he had overheard in the town. For that reason, there was one stop to be made before I returned to Dark Hollow.
At Orono, the store was still open. On the sign above the door, the words "Stuckey Trading" were illuminated from below, the name written in script. Inside, it smelled musty and felt oppressively warm, the AC making a noise as if glass were grinding in its works while it pumped stale air through its vents. Some guys in biker jackets were examining secondhand shotguns while a woman in a dress that was new when Woodstock convened flicked through a box of eight-tracks. Display cases held old watches and gold chains, while hunting bows stood upright on a rack beside the counter.