Ethan Cornish told me one more thing. He says that the Preacher's wife asked him to deal mercifully with us and he has refused to speak with her since. There is talk that he will scatter us to the four winds, where each family will make up for the sins of the community by spreading the word of God to new towns and cities. Tomorrow, the men, the women, and the children are to be divided into separate groups and each group will pray alone for guidance and forgiveness.
I have asked Ethan Cornish to place this note in the usual place and pray that you receive it in good health.
I am your sister,
Elizabeth
18
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, my father took me on my first airplane trip. He got a good deal from a man he knew at American Airlines, a neighbor of ours whom my father had helped out when one of his sons got picked up for possession of some stolen radios. We flew from New York to Denver and from Denver to Billings, Montana, where we hired a car and spent a night in a motel before driving east early the following morning.
The sun shone on the hills, burnishing the green and beige with touches of silver before melting into the waters of the Little Bighorn River. We crossed the river at the Crow Agency and drove in silence to the entrance to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was Memorial Day and a platform had been erected at the cemetery, before which a small crowd occupied rows of lawn chairs while the few who could not find seats stood amid the gravestones and listened to the words of the service. Above them, the Stars and Stripes flapped in the morning breeze, but we did not stay to listen. Instead, fragments came to us as we climbed toward the monument, words like “youth,” “fallen,” “honor,” and “death” fading and then growing once again in volume, echoing across the shifting grass as if they were being spoken both in the present and in the distant past.
This was where Custer's five cavalry troops, young men mostly, were annihilated by the combined forces of the Lakota and Cheyenne. The battle took place over the space of one hour, but the soldiers probably couldn't even see the enemy for much of that time; they lay hidden in the grass and picked off the cavalrymen one by one, biding their time.
I looked out over the hills and thought that the Little Bighorn was a bleak place to die, surrounded by low hills of green and yellow and brown fading to blue and purple in the distance. From any patch of raised ground, you could see for miles. The men who died here would have known without question that no one was coming to rescue them, that these were their final moments on earth. They died terrible, lonely deaths far from home, their bodies subsequently mutilated and left to lie scattered on the battlefield for three days before finally receiving burial in a mass grave atop a small ridge in eastern Montana, their names carved on a granite monument above them.
In that place, I closed my eyes and imagined that I felt their ghosts crowding around me. I seemed to hear them: the horses neighing, the gunshots, the grass breaking beneath their feet.
And for an instant I was there with them, and I understood.
There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.
It was my first glimpse of the honeycomb world, my first inkling that the past never truly dies but is strangely, beautifully alive in the present. There is an interconnectedness to all things, a link between what lies buried and what lives above, a capacity for mutability that allows a good act committed in the present to rectify an imbalance in times gone by. That, in the end, is the nature of justice: not to undo the past but, by acting further down the line of time, to restore some measure of harmony, some possibility of equilibrium, so that lives may continue with their burden eased and the dead may find peace in a world beyond this one.
Now, as I headed north, I thought again of that day on the battlefield, a day of remembrance for the dead, my father standing silently beside me as the wind tousled our hair. This would be another pilgrimage, another acknowledgment of the debt owed by the living to the dead. Only by standing where the families had once stood, only by placing myself amid the memories of their final moments and listening for the echoes, could I hope to understand.
This is a honeycomb world. At St. Froid Lake, its interior lay exposed.
As I drove, I called in a long-standing favor. In New York, a woman's voice asked me my name, there was a pause, and I was put through to the office of Special Agent in Charge Hal Ross. Ross had recently been promoted and was now one of three SACs in the FBI's New York field office, operating under an assistant director. Ross and I had crossed swords the first time we met, but in the aftermath of the Traveling Man's death our relationship had gradually become more congenial. The FBI was now reviewing all cases with which the Traveling Man had been involved as part of its ongoing investigation into his crimes, and a room at Quantico had been devoted to relevant material from law enforcement agencies around the country. The investigation had been given the code name Charon, after the ferryman in Greek mythology who carried lost souls to Hades, and all references to the Traveling Man carried that name. It was a long process and one that was still far from complete. “It's Charlie Parker,” I said, when Ross came on the line.
“Hey, how you doing? Social call?”
“Have I ever paid you a social call?”
“Not that I can remember, but there's always a first time.”
“This isn't it. You remember that favor you promised me?”
There was a long pause. “You sure cut to the chase. Go ahead.”
“It's Charon. Seven or eight years ago he came up to Maine in search of an organization called the Fellowship. Can you find out where he went and the names of anyone to whom he might have spoken?”
“Can I ask why?”
“The Fellowship may be connected to a case I'm investigating: the death of a young woman. Any information you can give me about them would help.”
“That's quite a favor, Parker. We don't usually hand over records.”
Impatience and anger crept into my voice and I had to struggle against shouting. “I'm not asking for the records, just some idea of where he might have gone. This is important, Hal.”
He sighed. “When do you need it?”
“Soon. As soon as you can.”
“I'll see what I can do. You just used up your ninth life. I hope you realize that.”
I gave a mental shrug. “I wasn't doing a whole lot with it anyway.”
I drove through avenues of trees, their branches green with new growth, to this place of failed hopes and violent death, and sunlight dappled my car as I went. I stayed on I-95 all the way to Houlton, then took U.S. 1 north to Presque Isle and from there drove through Ashland, Portage, and Winterville, until at last I came to the edge of the town of Eagle Lake. I drove by a WCSH truck and gave my name to the state trooper who was checking traffic along the road. He waved me through.
Ellis had called me back with the name of a detective from the state trooper barracks at Houlton. His name was John Brouchard and I found him waist deep in a muddy hole beneath the big tarp erected to protect the remains, digging with a spade in a steady, unhurried rhythm. That was how it worked up here; everybody played his or her part. State police, wardens, sheriff's deputies, ME's staff, all of them rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty. If nothing else it was overtime, and when you've got kids going to college, or alimony payments to meet, then time and a half is always welcome, whatever way it has to be earned.