And the mist rose off the white fields like smoke from a cold burning, carried by air currents unfelt by man so that it seemed almost a living thing, a pale manifestation with a purpose untold and unknown. The shapes of the trees became indistinguishable, the forests lost to the enveloping fog. It did not diminish or falter, but appeared to grow denser and deeper as the day drew on, dampening the towns and cities and falling like soft rain on windows and cars and people. By nightfall visibility was down to a matter of feet, and the highway signs flashed warnings about speed and distance.
And still the mist came. It took over the city, turning the brightest lights to ghosts of themselves, cutting off those who walked the streets from others like them, so that all felt alone in the world. In its way, it brought closer together those with families and other loved ones, for they sought solace with one another, a point of contact in a world that had grown suddenly unfamiliar.
Perhaps that was why they came back, or did I still believe that they had never quite departed to begin with? I had set them free, these ghosts of my wife and child. I had asked their forgiveness for my failings, and I had taken all that I had retained of their lives-clothes and toys, dresses and shoes-and burned them in my yard. I had felt them leave, following the marsh streams into the waiting sea beyond, and when I set foot in the house again, the smell of smoke and lost things thick upon me, it seemed different to me: lighter, somehow, as though a little of the clutter had been cleared from it, or an old, stale odor banished by the breezes through open windows.
They were my ghosts, of course. I had created them, in my way. I had given form to them, making my anger and grief and loss their own, so that they became to me hostile things, with all that I had once loved about them gone, and all that I hated about myself filling the void. And they took that shape and accepted it, because it was their way to return to this world, my world. They were not ready to slip into the shadows of memory, to become like dreams, to relinquish their place in this life.
And I did not understand why.
But that was not them. That was not the wife I had loved, however poorly, and the daughter I had once cherished. I had caught glimpses of them as they truly were, before I allowed them to be transformed. I saw my dead wife leading the ghost of a boy into a deep forest, his small hand in hers, and I knew that he felt no fear of her. She was the Summer Lady, taking him to those whom he had lost, accompanying him on his last journey through the thickets and trees. And so that he would not be frightened, so that he would not be alone, there was another with him, a girl close to his own age who skipped in winter sunlight as she waited for her playmate to arrive.
This was my wife and child. This was their true form. What I released in smoke and flames were my ghosts. What returned with the mist were their own.
I worked that night. I was not scheduled to do so, but Al and Lorraine, two of the regular bartenders who had been living together for almost as long as they had been working at the Bear, were involved in a collision on Route 1 not far from Scarborough Downs, and both were taken to the hospital as a precaution. With nobody to cover for them, it meant that I had to spend another night behind the bar. I was still tired from the night before, but there was nothing to be done except to J ona p keep going. I figured that I could probably get an extra day in comp time from Dave, which would give me a little more time to spend in New York the following week, but for now it was just me and Gary and Dave, serving up beers and burgers and trying to keep our heads above water.
Mickey Wallace had planned to talk to Parker again at the Bear that day, but an incident in the motel parking lot early in the afternoon had caused him to reconsider. A man who had been sitting at the bar earlier in the week, the one who had been flirting with the little redhead, was waiting beside Mickey’s car when he went outside shortly after 3 P.M., both car and man barely visible in the thickening fog. The man, who didn’t introduce himself but who Mickey remembered was called Jackie, hadn’t said much, but he’d made it clear to Mickey that he didn’t approve of him bothering Parker, and if Mickey continued to do so, he threatened to acquaint him with two gentlemen who were both bigger and less reasonable than he, Jackie, was, and who would fold Mickey into a packing crate, breaking limbs if they had to in order to make him fit, and then mail him to the darkest hole in Africa by the slowest and most circuitous route possible. When Mickey asked Jackie if Parker had put him up to this, Jackie had replied in the negative, but Mickey wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. It didn’t matter, in the end. Mickey wasn’t above playing dirty himself. He called the Bear to make sure that Parker was still working, and when he was asked if he wanted to talk to him, Mickey said that it was okay, he’d drop by and see him in person.
As darkness settled on the city, and while the mist was still heavy on the land, Mickey drove out to Scarborough.
It was past 8 P.M. as Mickey moved through the fog toward the house on the hill. He knew that Parker would not return until one or two in the morning, and the house next door was dark. An old couple, the Johnsons, lived there, but they seemed to be away. What was it that they called people who left for Florida when the cold began to bite? Birds? No, “snowbirds,” that was it.
Even if they were home, it wouldn’t have deterred him from what he was planning to do. It would just have meant a longer walk. With them gone, he could park his car close to the house and not have to get his feet cold and wet, or risk being asked by a curious cop what he happened to be doing walking down a marsh road in the winter darkness.
He had already driven by the subject’s house a couple of times in daylight, but he couldn’t take the chance of looking at it up close without the risk of being seen. Now that he wasn’t working as a PI any longer, Parker spent more of his time at home, but Mickey hadn’t been allowed the luxury of watching the house for long enough to establish his routines. That would come, in time.
Mickey still entertained the possibility that he could wear down Parker’s defenses and receive at least a modicum of cooperation from him. Mickey was tenacious, in a quiet way. He knew that most people wanted to talk about their lives, even if they didn’t always realize it themselves. They wanted a sympathetic ear, someone who would listen, who would understand. Sometimes all it took was a cup of coffee, but he’d seen it take a bottle of Chivas too. They were the two extremes, and the rest of humanity, in Mickey’s experience, slotted into various points between.
Mickey Wallace had been a good reporter. He was genuinely interested in those whose stories he wrote. He didn’t have to fake it. Human beings were just endlessly fascinating to him, and even the dullest had a story worth telling, however short, buried somewhere deep inside. But, in time, journalism began to weary and frustrate him. He didn’t have the energy for it that he had once enjoyed, or the hunger to go chasing people day after day just for the stories that he uncovered to be forgotten before the weekend. He wanted to write something that would last. He thought about writing novels, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t read them, so why would he want to write them? Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.
No, what interested Mickey was good and evil. It always had, ever since he was a kid watching The Lone Ranger and The Virginian on TV. Even as a reporter, it was the crime stories to which he was most drawn. True, they were more likely to appear above the fold, and Mickey liked seeing his name as close to the masthead as possible, but he was also fascinated by the relationship between killers and their victims. There was an intimacy, a bond between a murderer and a victim. It seemed to Mickey that a little of the victim’s identity was transferred to the killer, passed on at the moment of death, retained deep within his soul. He also believed, somewhat more controversially, that, in a sense, the victims’ deaths were ultimately what gave meaning to their lives, what defined them, what raised them from the anonymity of day-to-day ordinariness and bequeathed a kind of immortality on them, or as close to immortality as the temporary nature of public attention could allow. Mickey supposed that it wasn’t quite immortality after all, especially since the victims in question were dead, but it would do until he could think of a better word.