But he was growing old, and there were hungry young men who felt that their time had come, led by Oweny Farrell, the most ruthless of them all. Quickly, so fast that Tommy barely had time to register the threat before it was upon him, his operation began to fall apart. That old fault line, whose existence he had denied for so long, widened, and his world crumbled into it. He was isolated, and the whispering started. Tommy Morris was no longer solid. Tommy Morris wasn’t sound. Tommy Morris was a threat, because Tommy Morris knew too much. Men whom he had trusted began to keep their distance from him, so that they would not catch a stray bullet when the end came. Money disappeared, and with it his allies. Tommy knew his history. He remembered Donald Killeen, who had been top dog in Southie until, in 1972, Whitey decided that Killeen’s reign was over and had him shot to death on the evening of his son’s fourth birthday party. As if to emphasize the ease of the transition, and a sense of continuity, Whitey had subsequently taken over Killeen’s former headquarters, the Transit Café, as his own base, renaming it the Triple O’s.
Tommy had no intention of going out like Killeen.
But still they kept chipping away at him – the cops, the feds, his own kind. He had been forced to seek a sit-down, and one had been agreed for a bar in Chelsea after hours.
On the day of the proposed meet, Tommy had received an anonymous call advising him not to attend.
And that was when Tommy Morris had gone to ground.
Tommy slipped into the back of the car.
‘Drive,’ he said.
‘Drive where?’ said Ryan.
‘Doesn’t matter. Just drive.’
Ryan pulled out and headed away from the city. Dempsey handed over the shoebox filled with money. Tommy counted it and passed them another two hundred dollars each from the stash.
‘You can add it to what you took already,’ he said.
‘I’m hurt, Tommy,’ said Dempsey.
‘You will be if I catch you with your hand in the register again,’ said Tommy. Dempsey said nothing, but he cocked an eyebrow at Ryan.
‘You got news?’ asked Dempsey.
‘Yeah, I have news.’
‘About Oweny?’
‘No,’ said Tommy. He seemed distant, confused. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
Dempsey looked at the older man in the rearview mirror. ‘What is it, Tommy?’ he asked, and there was genuine solicitude in his voice.
‘It’s personal,’ said Tommy at last. ‘It’s blood.’
II
Don’t ask us what it’s like
In that moment when the body
skitters away
from that stupid
sheepy shape of breath.
Down here, no one asks.
We all died
boot to throat.
We all went out
Shrieking some bloody name.
from The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
by Danielle Pafunda
10
There are places along the Maine coast that are stunningly beautiful, often in a picture-postcard way that attracts tourists and snowbirds. Those stretches of the shoreline are dotted with expensive houses masquerading as summer cottages, and the towns that service them offer gourmet delicacies in the grocery stores, and chichi restaurants with waitstaff who make their efforts at service feel like hard-won favors for the undeserving.
But there are other places that speak of the ferocity of the sea, of communities sheltering behind buttresses of black rock and shingle beaches against which the waves throw themselves like besieging armies, gradually eroding the defenses over centuries, millennia, certain in the knowledge that eventually the ocean will triumph and smother the land. In those places the trees are bent, testament to the force of the wind, and the houses are weathered and functional, as sullen and resigned as the dogs that prowl their yards. Such towns do not welcome tourists, for they have nothing to offer them and the tourists have nothing to give, except to serve as a mirror for the natives’ own disappointments. Theirs is a hardscrabble existence. Those with youth and ambition leave, while those with youth but without ambition stay, or drift away for a time before returning, for small towns have their lures and a way of sinking deep hooks into skin and flesh and spirit.
Yet there is a balance to be maintained in such locales, and there is strength in unity. New blood will be welcomed as long as it plays its part in the great extended scheme of daily life, finding its level, its part in the complex machinery that powers the town’s existence: giving enough at the start to show willing, but not so much as to appear ingratiating; listening more than speaking, and not disagreeing, for here to disagree may be construed as being disagreeable, and one has to earn the right to be disagreeable, and then only after long years of cautious, mundane, and well-chosen arguments; and understanding that the town is both a fixed entity and a fluid concept, a thing that must be open to small changes of birth and marriage, of mood and mortality, if it is ultimately to stay the same.
And so there were communities like Pastor’s Bay along the Maine seaboard, each different, each similar. If Pastor’s Bay was distinctive, it was only in its comparative lack of beauty, elemental or otherwise. There was no beach, merely a pebbled shore. A tangle of jagged rocks ringed the peninsula at its eastern extreme and made any approach by boat hazardous if one didn’t know the tides. From there, a road led through a mix of old- and new-growth forest, past houses old and houses new, houses abandoned and houses reclaimed (including the one in which Anna Kore’s mother sat, red-eyed and hauntingly, terrifyingly still, her head filled with the thousand deaths of her child and a thousand visions of her safe return, each conclusion to the tale fighting for supremacy) until it found the town, its buildings almost leaning inward over the main street, the shades on the windows lowered slightly in pain, the skies above cloud-heavy and lowering, all life now tainted by the absence of one girl. Finally, leaving the town behind, the road undulated over uneven, rocky ground before arriving at the bridge to the mainland at a point almost half a mile to the south of the causeway of rock and dirt and scrub grass that, before the building of the first bridge, offered the sole path for those who wished to leave, either permanently or temporarily, and preferred to do so without paying the ferry toll.
The first bridge, the old wooden construct erected by the Heardings in 1885 with the proceeds of a tax levied on the residents, seemed set to put paid to the ferry forever, but the Heardings sank their pilings incorrectly, and a big storm in 1886 set the bridge to swaying, and people heard it moaning in its torments and went back to using the old path for foot traffic and the ferry for the transport of goods and livestock. The Heardings were forced to look again at the bridge, and the ferry continued its service while the repairs were made. By the time they had resunk the pilings, and reassured the natives of the bridge’s solidity, their business had gone belly-up because they had lost the trust of their neighbors. The Heardings closed their lumberyard and departed for Bangor, where they opened up for business under a new name, and denied any knowledge of bridges, or unsound pilings, or Pastor’s Bay. Still, the Heardings’ bridge stood for eighty years, until the passage of trucks and cars began to tell upon it, and its moans and cries resumed, and a new bridge began to take shape alongside it. Now all that was left of the Heardings’ bridge were the old pilings, for say this about the Heardings, if nothing else: They might have botched the job the first time, but they got it right the second. It was simply their misfortune to find themselves in a town where folk preferred things to be done right from the get-go, especially where their personal safety was concerned, and most particularly when it came to bridges and water, for they had the fear of drowning that comes from living close to the sea.