Meanwhile, Grace's work on the Aroostook Baptists had continued. Mercier had largely forgotten about it, until her life was ended in the sound of a gunshot that sent owls shooting from the trees and small animals scurrying into the undergrowth. Then Peltier had come to him, and the bond that linked them both to Grace had drawn them uneasily together.
“She went after the Fellowship, Mr. Mercier, and she died for it.”
He looked at me, and I saw his eyes desperately try to veil themselves in ignorance. “I don't know why she went after them,” he continued, a denial of an accusation that had not yet been made. Something bubbled in his voice, as if he was struggling to keep his bile down.
“I think you do,” I said. “I think that's why you hired me-to confirm what you already suspected.”
And at last I saw the veil tear and fall from his eyes in flames. He seemed about to utter some further denial, until a female voice was heard outside the door and the words melted like snowflakes on his tongue.
Deborah Mercier burst into the room. She looked at me in shock, then at her husband.
“He followed me here, Jack,” she said. “He broke into our house and assaulted our staff. Why are you sitting there drinking with him?”
“Deborah,…” Mercier began, in what might, in other circumstances, have been soothing tones but now sounded like the whispered assurances of an executioner to a condemned man.
“Don't!” she screamed. “Just don't. Have him arrested. Have him thrown out of the house. I don't care if you have him killed, but get him out of our lives!”
Jack Mercier stood and walked over to his wife. He held her firmly by the shoulders and looked down, and for the first time she seemed smaller and less powerful than he.
“Deborah,” he repeated, and drew her to him. Initially it seemed like a gesture of love, but as she struggled in his grip it became the opposite. “Deborah, what have you done?”
“I don't know what you mean,” she said. “What do you mean, Jack?”
“Please, Deborah,” he said. “Don't lie. Please don't lie, not now.”
Instantly, her struggles ceased and she began to cry.
“We have no further need of your services, Mr. Parker,” said Mercier, as her body shook. His back was to me as he spoke, and he made no effort to turn. “Thank you for your help.”
“They'll come after you,” I said.
“We'll deal with them. I intend to hand the Faulkner Apocalypse over to the police after my daughter's wedding. That will be an end to it. Now, please, leave my house.”
As I walked from the room, I heard Deborah Mercier whisper, over and over again, “I'm sorry, Jack, I'm sorry.” Something in her voice made me look back, and the glare from a single cold eye impaled me like a butterfly on a pin.
The porn star wasn't anywhere to be found as I left, so I couldn't reset his finger. I was about to get in my car when Warren Ober walked down the steps behind me and stood in the shell of light from the open door.
“Mr. Parker,” he called.
I paused and watched as his features tried to compose themselves into a smile. They gave up the struggle at the halfway point, making him look like a man who has just tasted a bad piece of fish.
“We'll forget about that little incident in the study, so long as you understand that you are to take no further part in investigating Grace Peltier's death or any events connected with it.”
I shook my head. “It doesn't work that way. As I already explained to Mrs. Mercier, her husband just bought my time and whatever expertise I could bring to the case. He didn't buy my obedience, he didn't buy my conscience, and he didn't buy me. I don't like walking away from unsolved cases, Mr. Ober. It raises moral difficulties.”
Ober's face fell, his carefully ordered features crumbling under the weight of his disappointment. “Then you'd better find yourself a good lawyer, Mr. Parker.”
I didn't reply. I just drove away, leaving Ober standing in the light like a solitary angel waiting to be consumed by the darkness.
Jack Mercier hadn't hired me to find out who had killed Grace, or that was not his primary reason for hiring me. He wanted to find out why she had been looking into the Fellowship to begin with, and I think he had suspected the answer all along, that he had seen it in his wife's eyes every time Grace was mentioned. Deborah Mercier wanted Grace to go away, to disappear. She and Jack already had a daughter together; he didn't need another. Through her husband, she knew just how dangerous those involved in the Fellowship could be, and she fed Grace to them.
I parked in the guest lot of the Black Point Inn and joined Angel and Louis in the big dining room, where they were sitting at a window, their table littered with the remains of what looked like a very enjoyable, and pretty expensive, dinner. I was happy to see them spending Mercier's money. It was tainted by its contact with his family. I ordered coffee and dessert, then told them all that had taken place. When I had concluded, Angel shook his head.
“That Deborah Mercier, she's some piece of work.”
We left the table and moved into the bar. Angel, I couldn't help but notice, was still wearing the red boots, to which he had added a pair of substandard chinos and a white shirt with a twisted seam. He caught me looking at the shirt and smiled happily.
“TJ Maxx,” he said. “Got me a whole new wardrobe for fifty-nine ninety-five.”
“Pity you didn't climb into it and throw yourself in the sea,” I replied.
They ordered beers, and a club soda for me. We were the only people in the bar.
“So what now?” asked Louis.
“Tomorrow night we pay a long overdue visit to the Fellowship,” I replied.
“And until then?”
Outside, the trees whispered and the waves broke whitely on Crescent Beach. I could see the lights of Old Orchard floating in the darkness like the glowing lures of strange, unseen sea creatures moving through the depths of black oceans. They called me to them, these echoes of the past, of my childhood and of my youth.
Like those nightmarish, colorless predators, the past could devour you if you weren't careful. It had consumed Grace Peltier, its dead hand reaching up from the mud and silt of a lake in northern Maine and pulling her down. Grace, Curtis, Jack Mercier: all of them linked together by the dreams, disappearance, and eventual exhumation of the Aroostook Baptists. Grace wasn't even born when they vanished, yet part of her had always been buried with them, and her short life had been blighted by the mystery of their disappearance.
Now, a misstep, a minor accident, had revealed the truth about their end. They had emerged into the world, breaking through the thin crust that separated present from past, life from death.
And I had seen them.
“I'm going north,” I said. “Somehow, this is all connected with the Aroostook Baptists. I want to see the place where they died.”
Louis looked at me. Beside him, Angel was silent.
It was happening again, and they knew it.
THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY
Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier…
The precise nature and extent of Lyall and Elizabeth's relationship must remain, perforce, largely unknown, but it is reasonable to assume that it included a significant element of sexual attraction. Elizabeth was a pretty woman, aged thirty-five at the time she joined the community. It is hard to find early pictures of her in which she is not smiling, although later photographs find her a more somber presence beside the unsmiling form of her husband, Frank. Elizabeth came from a small, poor family but appears to have been a bright young woman who, in a more enlightened (or liberal) community, and under less constrained financial circumstances, might have been given the space that she needed to grow. Instead, she made her match with Frank Jessop, fifteen years her senior but with some land and money to his name. It does not appear to have been a particularly happy union, and Frank was troubled with ill health in the years following the birth of their first child, James, which created a further rift between husband and wife.