“But, still, you are right. You should have been told before now, but perhaps you chose the time that was right for you. You decided when to begin asking the questions that led you here. Most have been answered for you. I will do my best to deal with the rest.”
Now that the time had come, I was not sure where to start.
“What do you know of Caroline Carr?”
“Next to nothing,” he said. “She came from what is now a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. Her father died when she was six, and her mother when she was nineteen. There are no surviving relatives. If she had been bred to be anonymous, one could not have asked for more.”
“But she wasn’t anonymous. Someone came looking for her.”
“So it seems. Her mother died in a house fire. Subsequent investigations revealed that it might have been started deliberately.”
“Might have been?”
“A cigarette smoldering at the bottom of a trash can, with papers piled on top of it, and a gas stove that was not turned off fully. It could have been an accident, except neither Caroline nor her mother smoked.”
“A visitor?”
“There were no visitors that night, according to Caroline. Her mother sometimes entertained gentlemen, but on the night that she died only she and Caroline were asleep in the house. Her mother drank. She was asleep on the couch when the fire broke out, and was probably dead before the flames reached her. Caroline escaped by climbing out of an upstairs window. When we met, she told me that she saw two people watching the house from the woods while it burned: a man and a woman. They were holding hands. But by that time someone had raised the alarm, and there were neighbors rushing to help her, and the fire trucks were on their way. Her main concern was for her mother, but the first floor had already been engulfed. When she thought again about the man and the woman, they were gone.
“She told me that she believed the couple in the woods had R ahe woods started the fire, but when she tried to tell the police of what she had seen they dismissed the sighting as irrelevant, or as the imaginings of a grief-stricken young woman. But Caroline saw them again, shortly after her mother’s funeral, and became convinced that they intended to do to her what they had done to her mother; or that, in fact, she might have been the target all along.”
“Why would she think that?”
“A sense she had. The way they looked at her, the way she felt when they looked at her. Call it a survival instinct. Whatever the reason for it, she left town after her mother’s funeral, intending to find work in Boston. There, someone tried to push her under a T train. She felt a hand on her back, and teetered on the edge of the platform before a young woman pulled her to safety. When she looked around, she saw a man and a woman moving toward the exit. The woman glanced back at her, and Caroline said she recognized her from Hartford. The second time she saw them was at South Station, as she boarded a train to New York. She thought that they were watching her from the platform, but they didn’t follow her.”
“Who were they?”
“We did not know then, and we still do not know for sure now. Oh, we know the name of the man who died beneath the wheels of a truck, and of the boy and girl your father killed at Pearl River, but those names ultimately proved useless. The confirmation of their identities did nothing to explain how they came to be hunting Caroline Carr, or you.”
“My father believed that Missy Gaines and the woman who killed my mother were the same person,” I said. “By extension, he must have believed that Peter Ackerman and the boy who died with Missy Gaines were also the same. How is that possible?”
“We have both witnessed strange things in the years since we first met,” Epstein replied. “Who knows what we should believe, and what we should discount? Nevertheless, let us look at the most logical, or plausible, explanation first: over a period of more than forty years, someone has repeatedly dispatched a pair of killers, a man and a woman, on a series of assassinations aimed at you, or those close to you, including the woman who ultimately gave birth to you. When one couple died, another eventually replaced them. These killers were distinguished by marks on their arms, one for the man and another for the woman, just here.” He indicated a point halfway between his wrist and his elbow on his left forearm. “There is no reason that we can find for why a succession of couples have been chosen to do this.
“The investigations into Missy Gaines, Joseph Dryden, and Peter Ackerman revealed that all led entirely normal existences for most of their lives. Ackerman was a family man, Missy Gaines a model teenager, Dryden already a tearaway, but no worse than many others. Then, at some point, their behavior changed. They cut themselves off from family and friends. They found a member of the opposite sex previously unknown to them, formed a bond, and went hunting, apparently first for Caroline Carr, and then, in the cases of Gaines and Dryden, for you. So that is the logical explanation: disparate couples, linked only by their intent to do harm to you and your family, either of their own volition or acting on the will of another.”
“But you don’t believe the logical explanation.”
“No, I do not.”
Epstein reached behind him a R abehind hind rummaged in the pocket of his overcoat, emerging with a piece of photocopied paper that he unfolded on the table. It was a copy of a scientific article, and it showed an insect in flight: a wasp.
“So, what do you know of wasps, Mr. Parker?”
“They sting.”
“True. Some, the largest group in Hymenoptera, are also parasitic. They target host insects-caterpillars, spiders-either by laying eggs externally that attack the host from outside, or by inserting eggs into the host body. Eventually, the larvae emerge and consume the host. Such behavior is relatively common in nature, and not just among wasps. The ichneumon fly, for example, uses spiders and aphids to host its young. When it injects its eggs, it also injects a toxin that paralyzes the host. The young then consume the host from the inside out, starting with the organs least necessary for survival, such as fat and entrails, in order to keep the host alive for as long as possible before finally progressing to the essential organs. Eventually, all that is left behind is an empty shell. The manner of consumption does display a certain instinctive understanding that a live host is better than a dead one, but otherwise it’s all rather primitive, if undeniably nasty.”
He leaned forward, tapping the picture of the wasp.
“Now, there is a variety of orb spider known as Plesiometa argyra, found in Costa Rica. It too is preyed upon by a wasp, but in an interesting way. The wasp attacks the spider, temporarily paralyzing it while it lays its eggs in the tip of the spider’s abdomen. Then it leaves, and the spider’s ability to move is restored. It continues to function as it has always done, building its webs, trapping insects, even as the wasp larvae cling to its abdomen and feed on its juices through small punctures. This continues for perhaps two weeks, and then something very odd occurs: the spider’s behavior changes. Somehow, by means unknown, the larvae, using chemical secretions, compel the spider to alter its web construction. Instead of a round web, the spider builds a smaller, reinforced platform. Once that is complete, the larvae kill their host and cocoon themselves in the new web, safe from wind, rain, and predatory ants, and the next stage of their development begins.”
He relaxed slightly. “Suppose we were to substitute wandering spirits for wasps, and humans for spiders, then, perhaps, we might begin to have some understanding of how seemingly ordinary men and women could, at some point, change utterly, slowly dying inside while remaining unchanged without. An interesting theory, don’t you think?”
“Interesting enough to get a man banned from the local cultural center.”
“Or committed, if he were unwise enough to speak such thoughts too loudly, but this is not the first time that you have heard of such things: spirits flitting from body to body, and people who apparently live beyond their allotted span, slowly rotting yet never dying. Is that not right?”