His wife, Louise, was by all accounts a strikingly beautiful woman, with dark hair only marginally longer than that of her husband. She did not associate with the Preacher's congregation: if he was approached after the service, she would remain standing behind him, listening to what passed between the Preacher and the supplicant, without passing comment or participating in any way. It seems to have been her constant unspeaking presence at her husband's side that made people wary of her, although two witnesses spoke of her intervening physically when her husband was accused of perpetrating acts of fraud during a healing service in Rumford, Maine, in 1963. She did so entirely in silence, but her strength and the nature of her intervention was sufficient to enable those who saw it to recall it in detail almost forty years later. Nevertheless, she always deferred to her husband and exhibited no signs of disobedience toward him, in line with fundamentalist religious doctrine.
Louise's own family, the Dautrieves, originally came from east Texas and were Southern Baptists. According to the recollection of family members, they appear to have been largely supportive of her decision to marry Faulkner, who was only nineteen when they met, regarding him as a man of good faith although he was not himself a Baptist. After their marriage there was little direct contact between Louise and her family, and surviving relatives say that there was no contact at all once she left for Eagle Lake.
Privately, most believe that she is now dead.
12
RACHEL WAS ALREADY BACK in her apartment when I returned from my encounter with Mickey Shine. She greeted me with a peck on the lips.
“You have a good day?” she asked.
Under the circumstances, “good” was probably a relative concept.
“I found out some stuff,” I replied neutrally.
“Uh-huh. Good stuff, or bad stuff?”
“Um, kind of bad, but nothing I hadn't suspected already.”
She didn't ask if I wanted to talk more about it. Sometimes it struck me forcefully that Rachel knew me very well while I hardly seemed to know her at all. I watched her open her bag and produce one of her wire-rimmed notebooks, from which she removed a single printed page.
“I don't think that what I have to tell you qualifies as good news either,” she said. “Some folks at the chemistry department examined that business card. They E-mailed me the results. I guess they thought it might be a little technical to explain over the phone.”
“And?”
“The card was infused with a fluid called cantharidin, concentrated cantharidin,” she continued. “It's sometimes used in medical procedures to produce blistering. One portion of the top right-hand corner had been lightly waxed, presumably so this Mr. Pudd could hold it without affecting his own skin. As soon you took it in your hand, your body heat and the moisture on your fingers activated the cantharidin and you started to blister.”
I thought about it for a moment.
“So he used some kind of medical product on the card,…” I began, but Rachel shook her head.
“No, I said it was used for medical purposes, but the substance on the card was a very specific form of the toxin, produced, according to the research assistant who examined it, only by ‘certain vesicating arthropods.’ It's blister beetle venom. The man who gave it to you must have harvested the venom, concentrated it, then applied it to the card.”
I recalled Mr. Pudd's smile as I held the card in my hand.
You're also irritating, but it doesn't say that on your card either.
Oh, but it does, in its way.
I also thought of Epstein, and the substance that had been injected into him.
“If he harvested beetle venom, then I suppose he could harvest other types as well?” I asked Rachel.
“Such as?”
“Spider venom, maybe?”
“I called the lab after I received the message to clarify one or two details about the procedure, so I don't see why not. As I understand it, the beetle venom could have been extracted using some form of electric shock to provoke the insect into releasing the toxin. Apparently, the harvesting of spider venom is a little trickier. The spider has to be sedated, usually by cooling it with carbon dioxide, then put under a microscope. Each time it's shocked, it produces a tiny amount of venom, which can then be collected. You can usually shock an individual spider three or four times before it has to be put out to pasture.”
“So you'd need a whole lot of spiders to produce a reasonable amount of venom?”
“Probably,” she replied.
I wondered how many spiders had been milked in order to kill Yossi Epstein. I also wondered why anyone would bother. After all, it would have been far easier, and less conspicuous, simply to have killed Epstein in a more conventional way. Then I remembered Alison Beck, and how she must have felt as the widows struggled in her mouth and the recluses moved around her in the small, enclosed space of the car. I recalled the look in Mickey Shine's eyes as he spoke of the spiders in the bathtub, and the wounds gouged in his skin by their bites. And I thought of my own feelings as the blisters appeared on my skin, and the sensation of Mr. Pudd's thin, hairy fingers brushing against my own.
He did it because it was fun, because he was genuinely curious about the effects. He did it because to be preyed upon by a small, dark, consuming creature, multilegged and many-eyed, terrified his victims in ways that a bullet or a knife could not, and gave a new intensity to their sufferings. Even Epstein, who endured death by injection, had felt something of this pain as his muscles spasmed and cramped, his breathing began to fail, and his heart at last gave way under the pressure on his body.
It was also a message. I was certain of that. And the only person for whom that message could be meant was Jack Mercier. Epstein and Beck were in the photograph on his wall, and Warren Ober's law firm had been handling Epstein's legal challenge to the IRS tax exemption granted to the Fellowship. I knew then that I had to return to Maine, that somehow Grace Peltier's death was linked to moves that her father and others had been making against the Fellowship. But how could Pudd and those who aided him have known that Grace Peltier was Jack Mercier's daughter? There was also the question of how a woman who was researching the history of a long-departed religious group ended up trying to corner the leader of the Fellowship. I could only find one answer: someone had pointed Grace Peltier in the direction of the Fellowship, and she had died because of it.
I tried calling Mercier again as Rachel went to take a shower, but I got the same maid and a promise that Mr. Mercier would be told that I had called. I asked for Quentin Harrold and was similarly informed that he was not available. I was tempted to throw my cell phone to the ground and stamp on it, but I figured I might need it, so I contented myself with tossing it in disgust on Rachel's couch. It wasn't as if I had anything to tell Mercier anyway, or certainly nothing that he didn't already know. I just didn't like being kept in the dark, especially when Mr. Pudd was occupying space in that same darkness.
But there was another reason that I had yet to learn for Mr. Pudd's killing methods, a tenet that had its roots in the distant past, and in other, older traditions.