The clearer skies of recent days were now under siege from masses of dark cloud as I headed north out of Gorham. There was a storm front heading down from the north, and flooding had been forecast for low-lying areas. I touched base with Louis and Angel, but Allan had not yet left his girlfriend’s house. Chief Allan is a horny dog. It was an odd turn of phrase. Each time I considered it I heard a woman’s voice speaking, and I thought of Mrs. Shaye scattering young girls like pigeons, and the look she had cast in the direction of her employer. But ‘cooze’? Would a woman like Mrs. Shaye use that word?
Somewhere out there, too, was Tommy Morris, with Engel circling him but not approaching, waiting for him to make his next move. They should have been tearing Maine apart to find him after that stunt he’d pulled at his sister’s house, but they were not. In fact, word of what had occurred had not even made it to the media. It might simply have been Engel trying to save the Bureau’s blushes, and for that he could hardly be blamed, but it fitted in with a larger pattern of concealment and gamesmanship that had underpinned all of Engel’s actions so far.
And behind it all, like the marks on a wall where a picture had once hung, or the clean space on a dusty shelf, the evidence of absence, was the fact of Anna Kore’s disappearance. Allan’s relationship with an unusually young woman, Haight’s mess of truths, half-truths and possibly outright lies, Engel’s desire to entrap Tommy Morris, and Morris’s efforts to escape his enemies and perhaps redeem himself by acting on his sister’s behalf, all were as nothing compared with the fate of the lost girl. I saw Gordon Walsh framed against the dark and the stars, and I heard him say again that he thought Anna Kore was dead. He might have wished to believe otherwise, but the tenor of his investigation was predicated on the likelihood that she was already the victim of a homicide. He found it difficult to hold two opposing possibilities in his head – one of life, the other of death. The odds favored death, and a shallow grave in the woods. The wardens had been searching with that in mind, and they knew how important it was that the girl’s resting place was found before the snows came. Winter would alter the landscape and hide forever any trace of digging and concealment, but this was a huge state and they could not search every inch of it. If Anna Kore’s body had been removed any distance at all from Pastor’s Bay, it might never be found.
But I wanted her to be alive. I needed her to be alive. I did not want to have to tell my daughter that a young girl had been dragged into the underworld, either vanished forever with no trace of her to be found, or with something of her returned to this world, ruined and decayed and without its soul.
According to my New Hampshire Atlas Gazetteer, Little Pond Lane lay off Jimtown Road, right at the edge of Moose Brook State Park. The light was already fading as I found the turn, due in part to the waning of the day but also because of the gathering clouds. There were only two houses on the dead end, one lit and one unlit. The darker house was at the termination of the lane, where the road bled out into forest. It was a manufactured home painted gray and white, with an A-frame roof and a screened front porch. The yard was thick with fallen leaves from the mature trees that surrounded the property. At the back of the house, a shallow slope led down to what I assumed was Little Pond itself, which didn’t exceed the expectations raised by its name. It was about fifty feet in circumference, and coated with a pale scum.
I knocked on the porch door for form’s sake, but there was no reply. It opened to the touch, but the front door itself was locked, as was the back, and the windows were sealed. Still, it doesn’t take much to break into a trailer home; one shattered frame of glass later, I was inside. Apart from some cheap furniture and a couple of polyester rugs, the house was entirely empty. I could find no clothing, no pictures, no indication that anyone lived there. A thin layer of dust coated everything, but it was the accumulation of a couple of months, not years. The bathroom was clean and the mattresses in the two bedrooms were stripped of sheets and pillows, the bed linen neatly folded and placed back in their original zippered packing to save them from damp, the pillows and comforters tied up in big plastic bags from Walmart. There were no personal papers, no photographs, no books. All the drawers and closets were empty.
I went back outside. The dying sun, mostly obscured by clouds, gave a faint yellow tinge to the filth on the pond. I walked around the property, finding nothing untoward apart from the remains of a couple of broken cinder blocks that had accumulated a coating of mold, leaves, and cobwebs. I moved one of the shards and watched insects scurry in alarm across bare earth. I looked back at the house. I could see no cinder blocks, and there was no evidence of any kind of construction nearby, not even a barbecue pit.
I headed down to the other house on the lane. This one was a permanent dwelling, and well maintained, although winter blooms, a child’s bicycle, and a battered basketball hoop indicated that this was still a family home. I knocked on the door and a woman opened it. She was plain-looking, and in her early thirties. There was a paring knife in her hand. A boy of two or three peered around her legs, chewing on a piece of raw carrot. I showed her my ID, and explained that I was looking for the owners of the house at the end of the lane.
‘Oh, we never got to know them,’ she said. ‘They’d moved out by the time we moved in. We never met them but once.’
‘Do you remember anything about them?’
‘Nah. The woman was old. I think her name was Beth or something. Her son lived with her. He was kind of shy. We introduced ourselves after we bought the house, but we couldn’t move in for a while. This place had been empty for a couple of years, and it needed a lot of work done to it. My husband did most of it. He knew the old lady to say hi to while he was fixing things up, but he had to stop for winter, and when he got back to work they were gone.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘Well, we’ve been here more than ten years, and that was right at the start.’
‘Who looks after the house now?’
‘A relative. I think he said he was a cousin, or a nephew. The old lady, Beth, she found the cold too much, he said, and moved down to Florida. Tampa, I think. He comes by a couple of times a year. Sometimes he stays for a night, because we see a lamp burning – there’s no power to the house – but he keeps himself to himself. We don’t mind. It’s not unusual up here.’
‘A relative? Not her son.’
‘No, he looks like him. He wears his hair the same way, and the same kind of glasses, but it’s not him. I have a good memory for faces. Names not so much, but faces I never forget.’
I thanked her and was about to leave when I saw a pile of threaded rods lying by the garage door. They varied in length from three to six feet.
‘My husband’s in construction,’ she explained, then added, ‘He’ll be back soon,’ just in case I had any bad intentions in mind.
‘I know this sounds weird,’ I said, ‘but would you mind if I borrowed one of those rods for a few minutes? I’ll bring it back.’
She looked puzzled. ‘What will you be using it for?’
‘I want to test the ground.’
She looked even more puzzled, but agreed. I picked up a rod that was about four feet long and headed back to the first house. There had been a lot of rain, and the ground was relatively soft so close to the pond, but it was still an effort to force the rod down. Starting at the pile of broken blocks I began to work my way out, probing as deeply as I could at the ground, trying to stick to grids of about two square feet. I’d been working at it for only five minutes when the rain came, and for another five minutes or so when a truck pulled into the yard. Stenciled on the side was the name ‘Ron Carroll – Independent Contractor.’ A big man in tan work boots, old jeans, and a red windbreaker stepped from the truck.