This week, candles will remain lit in every house in the town for the girl whose beautiful singing voice led her to be called the “Nightingale of Eagle Lake.”
(from the Bangor Daily News , October 28, 1963)
III
To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned…
– RUDYARD KIPLING,
“GENTLEMAN-RANKERS”
17
THE NEXT MORNING I AWOKE to a throbbing at the back of my hand, a souvenir of my encounter with Deborah Mercier. I was no longer working for her husband, but there were still calls to be made. I checked in once again with Buntz in Boston, who assured me that Rachel was safe and sound, before calling the Portland PD.
I wanted to see the place in which the Aroostook Baptists had been interred. I could, I supposed, have been accused of morbid curiosity, but it was more than that; everything that had occurred-all of the deaths, all of the tainted family histories-was tied up with these lost souls. The burial ground at St. Froid was the epicenter for a series of shock waves that had affected generations of lives, touching even those who had no blood connection with the people buried beneath its cold, damp earth. It had united the Peltiers and the Merciers, and that unity had found its ultimate expression in Grace.
I had a vision of her, scared and miserable, standing on Higgins Beach while a selfish young man cast stones on the water, concerned only for the opportunities that would be lost to him if he became a father at such an age. I blamed her, I knew: for wanting me, for allowing me to be with her, for taking me inside her. As the stones fell I sank with them, dropping slowly to the seabed, where the rush of the waves drowned out her voice, and the sound of her tears and the adult world, with all its torments and betrayals, was lost in a blur of green and blue.
She must have known, even then, about her family's past. Maybe she felt a kind of kinship with Elizabeth Jessop, who had departed for a new existence many years before and was never seen again. Grace was a romantic, and I think she would have wanted to believe that Elizabeth had found the earthly paradise for which she had been searching, that she had somehow remade her life, sealing herself off from the past in the hope that she could start afresh. Except that something inside her whispered that Elizabeth was dead: Ali Wynn had told me as much.
Then Deborah Mercier fed Grace the knowledge that Faulkner might still be alive, and that through him the truth of Elizabeth Jessop's disappearance might be revealed to her. It seemed certain that Grace had then approached Carter Paragon, who, through his own weakness and the sale of a recently created Faulkner Apocalypse, had allowed the possibility of the preacher's continued existence to be exposed. Following that meeting, Grace had been killed and her notes seized along with one other item. That second item, I suspected, was another Apocalypse that had somehow come into Grace's possession. How that had come to pass would require renewed pressure on the Beckers to find out if their daughter, Marcy, could fill in the blanks. That would be tomorrow's work. For today, there was Paragon, and St. Froid Lake, and one other visit that I had chosen not to mention to Angel and Louis.
PIs don't usually get access to crime scenes, unless they're the first to arrive at them. This was the second time in less than eighteen months that I had asked Ellis Howard, the deputy chief in charge of the Portland PD's Bureau of Investigation, for his help in bending the rules a little. For a time, Ellis had tried to convince me to join the bureau, until the events in Dark Hollow conspired to make him reconsider his offer.
“Why?” he asked me when I called him and he eventually agreed to talk to me. “Why should I do it?”
“Don't even say hello.”
“Hello. Why? What's your interest in this?”
I didn't lie to him. “Grace and Curtis Peltier.” There was silence on the other end of the line as Ellis ran through a list of possible permutations and came up cold. “I don't see the connection.”
“They were related to Elizabeth Jessop. She was one of the Aroostook Baptists.” I decided not to mention the other blood link, through Jack Mercier. “Grace was preparing a thesis on the history of the group before she died.”
“Is that why Curtis Peltier died in his bath?”
That was the trouble with trying to deal with Ellis; eventually, he always started to ask the difficult questions. I tried to come up with the most nebulous answer possible, in an effort to obscure the truth instead of lying outright. Eventually, I knew, the lies I was telling, both directly and by omission, would come back to haunt me. I had to hope that by the time they did I would have accumulated enough knowledge to save my hide.
“I think that someone may have believed that he knew more than he did,” I told Ellis.
“And who might that person be, do you think?”
“I don't know anything but his name,” I replied. “He calls himself Mr. Pudd. He tried to warn me off investigating the circumstances surrounding Grace Peltier's death. He may also be connected with the killing of Lester Bargus and Al Z down in Boston. Norman Boone over in the ATF has more on it, if you want to talk to him.”
I'd kept Curtis Peltier's name out of my conversation with Boone, but now Curtis was dead and I wasn't sure what debt of confidentiality I owed to Jack Mercier. Increasingly, I was coming under pressure to reveal the true connections to the Fellowship. I was lying to people, concealing possible evidence of a conspiracy, and I wasn't even sure why. Part of it was probably a romantic desire to make up for some small adolescent pain I had caused Grace Peltier, a pain she had probably long forgotten. But I was also aware that Marcy Becker was in danger, and that Lutz, a policeman, was somehow connected with the death of her friend. I had no proof that he was involved, but if I told Ellis or anyone else what I knew, then I would have to reveal Marcy's existence. If I did that, I believed that I would be signing her death warrant.
“Were you working for Curtis Peltier?” said Ellis, interrupting my thoughts.
“Yes.”
“You were looking into his daughter's death?”
“That's right.”
“I thought you didn't do that kind of work anymore.”
“She used to be a friend of mine.”
“Bullshit.” “Hey, I have friends.”
“Not many, I'll bet. What did you find out?”
“Nothing much. I think she spoke to Carter Paragon, the sleazebag who runs the Fellowship, before she died, but Paragon's assistant says she didn't.”
“That's it?”
“That's it.”
“And they pay you good money for this?”
“Sometimes.”
His voice softened a little. “The investigation into Grace Peltier's death has been… reenergized since her father's murder. We're working alongside the state police to assess possible connections.”
“Who's the liaison for state CID?”
I heard the rustling of paper. “Lutz,” said Ellis. “John Lutz, out of Machias. If you know anything about Grace Peltier's death, I'm sure he'd like to talk to you.”
“I'm sure.”
“And now you want to look at a mass grave in northern Maine?”
“I just want to see the site, that's all. I don't want to drive all the way up there and have some polite state trooper turn me back half a mile from the lake.”
Ellis released a long breath. “I'll make a call. I can't promise you anything. But…”
I knew there would be a “but.”