The first time.
We sat at a table in the Bayou Kitchen, a tiny little diner over on Deering that until recently had only opened for lunch but now did weekend dinners as well. It could seat maybe twenty people, and its counter was piled high with sauces that carried warnings advising that they shouldn’t be used by pregnant women or people with heart complaints. The food was good, and in winter it was mainly locals who went there.
Angel was still rubbing his shin occasionally and casting hurt glances at Louis, so it was left to me to do most of the talking. I told them a little more of the history of the Grady house, and about my encounters with Chief Grass, Denny Maguire, and Gunnar Tillman’s boy, among others.
“You sure Maguire’s clean?” asked Louis.
“I didn’t get anything bad from him.”
“You tell Matheson about him?”
“No.”
I had spoken with Matheson that morning. He told me that he had a key for the basement in the house, and he thought that the cops had one too, but he hadn’t realized that there was no copy on the set of keys he had given to me. He promised to get one to me by the end of the day. He also told me that he’d had a shouting match with Chief Grass after Grass had questioned the wisdom of hiring me.
“Matheson is edgy enough as it is,” I said. “The last thing I need is for him to start bothering Maguire about the past.”
“What about Czabo?”
“I’d call him a suspect, but there hasn’t been a crime. Still, the photo in the mailbox isn’t his style. He’s a watcher, not a doer.”
“And the antiques guy?”
“The Collector?” I had begun to think of him by that name. After all, I had no other. “He told me he had nothing to do with the photograph. He said he just wanted a mirror from the house, but he knows something.”
“Could be he’s a grave robber, like Voodoo Ray,” said Angel.
“Maybe if you just gave him a mirror, he’d tell you what he knows,” suggested Louis.
“I don’t think so. Anyway, nothing in the house is mine to give away.”
“You think he’s a threat?”
I put my hands up in the air.
“A threat to what? To us? We haven’t done anything. For once, we’re free and clear. Nobody hates us on this case.”
“Yet,” said Angel.
“Always happens, though,” said Louis.
“If only they took the time to get to know us a little better,” said Angel.
“I’ve taken the time to get to know you a little better,” I said, “and look where it got me. You’re on the payroll, by the way, so it’s not a charity case. Matheson signed off on the surveillance.”
Louis finished off his jambalaya, soaking up the last of the sauce and rice with some fresh bread.
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes, was what he said. I told him we’d give it a week, then review our options.”
“Sounds like it could be nothing,” said Louis. “A photograph in a mailbox, that’s all you got?”
“That’s all.”
I reached into my pocket and removed a copy of the Matheson picture. I carefully unfolded it, then pushed it slowly across the table.
“But do you want to take the chance?”
The two men looked at the image of the young girl. Angel answered for both of them.
“No,” he said. “I guess not.”
Later that afternoon they stopped by the house to say hi to Rachel. She was a little distant, but neither of them remarked upon it. I thought that she was just tired after the night before, but it was the first sign of troubles to come. The pain and danger that she had endured by remaining with me, and the fears that she felt for herself and our child, seemed to her to be rendered more acute by the presence of two men who were friends yet who always carried with them a potential for violence. They reminded her of what had befallen her in the past, and what might befall the child she carried. Looking back, perhaps they also caused her to reflect on my own capacities, and the possibility that I might always draw violent men to me. She had attempted to explain these things to me before, and I had tried to reassure her as best I could. I hoped that, in time, her worries would fade. I think she hoped so too, even though she feared that they would not. I wanted to ask her again about the visit to the hospital, and the tears that followed, but there was no time. Instead, I held her and told her I’d be home before midnight, and she squeezed me and said that would be fine.
I drove to Two Mile Lake as the afternoon light began to dim, Angel and Louis following behind. It was dark by the time we arrived, and the bare trees slept over us as we passed the Grady house and took the next turning on the right. The road led up to a run-down, single-storey farmhouse. Like the Grady house itself, it had been bought by Matheson after his daughter’s disappearance. It seemed to me that he wanted to seal off the whole area from the possible depredations of strangers, as though his loss were inextricably tied up with the very fabric of the Grady house, with its surrounding fields and with the buildings that had silently borne witness to the events that had occurred in their purview. Perhaps he envisaged her, lost and alone, desperately trying to seek a doorway back into the world that she knew, and felt that any change to the place from which she had vanished would make it impossible for her to return; or maybe this was all simply one great monument, an ornate offering upon which her name and the names of the other children were deeply inscribed yet never seen.
I opened the door to the farmhouse and led Angel and Louis inside. It had been cleaned recently, for there was little dust on any of the surfaces. Most of the rooms remained empty, apart from the kitchen, where there was a table and four chairs, and the sitting room, which contained a sofa bed and a radiator. In one of the bedrooms there were some ladders and tins of varnish and paint. An envelope on the table, addressed to me, contained a set of keys to the Grady house for Angel and Louis, and a single key with a note from Matheson identifying it as the one for the basement.
“Nice,” said Angel, as he took in his surroundings. “Very minimalist.”
“Who knows that we’re here?” asked Louis.
“We do, and so does Matheson.”
“The cops?”
“No. Anyone asks, you tell them you’re here to do some work on the house and Matheson will back you up, but this place is pretty much invisible from the road so we shouldn’t be bothered. You two will take the lion’s share of the duty-twenty-four on, twelve off. There’s a motel about three miles out of town. I’ve rented a room there for the next week. This place has no hot water, and we can’t risk too many lights. There are blackout shades in the kitchen, so if you want to read, then that’s the place. There’s a radio and TV in there too.”
I led them to the back bedroom. There, a single window looked down upon the Grady house, framed by a gap in the trees. It would be hard for anyone to approach it from north, south, or east without being seen, and the west side of the house had no point of entry.
“There it is,” I said.
“You been in there?” asked Angel.
“Yes. Do you want to check it out?”
Among the items left by Matheson was a plan of the house. Louis spread it out on the floor and examined it.
“Is this accurate?”
I looked it over.
“Looks like it. There’s not much to add. Mirrors on the walls. Some old furniture, but most of it is stacked away, so the floors are clear.”
Louis shrugged. “Maybe we’ll take a look in daylight if we get bored.”
We watched the shape of the house, darker yet against the night sky.
“So we wait,” he said.
“We wait.”
Nothing happened that night. I drove home to Rachel after a couple of hours, then returned the following evening. It set the pattern for the week that followed. Sometimes I would stay with them for a couple of hours after they arrived to relieve me, sitting at the window and talking with Angel while Louis rested or read, the Grady house before us like a dark hand raised against the sky.