“I’m not just concerned for my own sake,” she said. “My daughter, Jenna, she’s just eleven. I’m afraid to let her out of the house alone now. I’ve tried to explain to her a little of what’s been happening, but I don’t want to frighten her too much either.”
“What do you want me to do about this man?” I said. It seemed like a strange question to ask, I knew, but it was necessary. Rebecca Clay had to understand what she was getting herself into.
“I want you to talk to him. I want you to make him go away.”
“That’s two different things.”
“What?”
“Talking to him and making him go away.”
She looked puzzled. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she said. “I’m not following you.”
“We need to be clear on some things before we begin. I can approach him on your behalf, and we can try to clear all of this up without trouble. It could be that he’ll see reason and go about his business, but from what you’ve told me it sounds like he’s got some notions fixed in his head, which means that he might not go without a fight. If that’s the case, either we can try to get the cops to take him in, and look for a court order preventing him from approaching you, which can be hard to get and even harder to enforce, or we can find some other way to convince him that he should leave you alone.”
“You mean threaten him, or hurt him?”
She seemed to quite like the idea. I didn’t blame her. I had met people who had endured years of harassment from individuals, and had seen them worn down by tension and distress. Some of them had resorted to violence in the end, but it usually just led to an escalation of the problem. One couple I knew had even ended up being sued by the wife’s stalker after the husband threw a punch in frustration, further entangling their lives with his.
“They’re options,” I said, “but they leave us open to charges of assault, or threatening behavior. Worse, if the situation is not handled carefully, then this whole affair could get much worse. Right now, he hasn’t done more than make you uneasy, which is bad enough. If we strike at him, he may decide to strike back. It could put you in real danger.”
She almost slumped with frustration.
“So what can I do?”
“Look,” I said, “I’m not trying to make out that there’s no hope of resolving this painlessly. I just want you to understand that if he decides to stick around, then there are no quick fixes.”
She perked up slightly. “So you’ll take the job?”
I told her my rates. I informed her that, as a one-man agency, I wouldn’t take on other jobs that might conflict with my work on her behalf. If it became necessary to call on outside help, I would advise her of any additional costs that might arise. At any point, she could call a halt to our arrangement, and I would try to help her find some other way of handling her problem before I left the job. She seemed content with that. I took payment up front for the first week. I didn’t exactly need the money for myself-my lifestyle was pretty simple-but I made a point of sending some money to Rachel every month even though she said it wasn’t necessary.
I agreed to start the following day. I would stay close to Rebecca Clay when she headed out to work in the mornings. She would inform me when she was leaving her office for lunch, for meetings, or to go home in the evening. Her house was fitted with an alarm, but I arranged to have someone check it out, just in case, and to fit extra bolts and chains if necessary. I would be outside before she left in the morning, and I would remain within sight of the house until she went to bed. At any time she could contact me, and I would be with her within twenty minutes.
I asked her if, by any chance, she might have a photograph of her father that she could give me. She had anticipated the request although she appeared slightly reluctant to hand it over after she had taken it from her bag. It showed a thin, gangly man wearing a green tweed suit. His hair was snow-white, his eyebrows bushy. He wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, and he had a stern, old-fashioned air of academia about him. He looked like a man who belonged amid clay pipes and leather-bound volumes.
“I’ll have some copies made and get it back to you,” I said.
“I have others,” she replied. “Hold on to it for as long as you need to.”
She asked me if I would keep an eye on her while she was in town that day. She worked in real estate and had some business to attend to for a couple of hours. She was worried that the man might approach her while she was in the city. She offered to pay me extra, but I declined. I had nothing better to do anyway.
So I followed her for the rest of the day. Nothing happened, and there was no sign of the man with the dated quiff and the scars upon his face. It was tedious and tiring, but at least it meant that I did not have to return to my house, my not-quite-empty house. I shadowed her so that my own ghosts could not shadow me.
Chapter II
The revenger walked along the boardwalk at Old Orchard, close to where the Guesser’s concession had stood for summer upon summer. The old man was gone now, and the revenger supposed that he was probably dead; dead, or no longer capable of performing the feats that he once had, his eyes unable to see as clearly, his hearing muffled and decayed, his memory too fragmented to record and order the information being fed to it. The revenger wondered if the showman had remembered him until the end. He thought that might have been the case, for was it not in the man’s nature to forget little, to discard nothing that might prove useful?
He had been fascinated by the Guesser’s talent, had watched him discreetly for an hour or more before he had eventually approached him for the first time on that cool evening close to summer’s end. It was an extraordinary talent to find in such a small, strange-looking little man, surrounded by cheap trinkets in a simple booth: to be able to tell so much at a glance, to deconstruct an individual almost without thinking, forming a picture of his life in the time that it took most people to glance at a clock. From time to time he had come back to this place, and had hidden himself in the crowds, watching the Guesser from a distance. (And even then, had the little man not been aware of him? Had he not seen him scan the crowds uneasily, seeking the eyes that examined him too closely, his nostrils twitching like a rabbit sensing the approach of the fox?) Perhaps that was why he had come back here, as if by some faint chance the Guesser had chosen to remain in this place, seeing out the winter close by the water’s edge instead of fleeing it for warmer climes.
If the revenger had found him here, what would he have said? Teach me. Tell me how I may know the man whom I seek. I will be lied to. I want to learn how to recognize the lie when it comes. Would he have explained why he had come back to this place, and would the little man have believed him? Of course he would, for a lie would not slip past him.
But the Guesser was long gone, and so the revenger was left only with the memory of their single meeting. There had been blood on his hands that day. It had been a comparatively simple task to accomplish: a vulnerable man laid to rest, a man who might have been tempted to barter what he knew for protection from those who sought him. From the moment that he had fled, his time left on this earth had been counted in seconds and minutes, hours and days, and no more than that. As five days became six, he had been found, and he had been killed. There was fear at the end, but little pain. It was not for Merrick to torture or torment, though he did not doubt that, in those final moments, as the victims understood the implacable nature of the one who had come for them, there had been torment enough. He was a professional, not a sadist.
Merrick. That was his name then. It was the name on his record, the name that he had been given at birth, but it now meant nothing to him. Merrick was a killer, but he killed for others, not himself. It was an important distinction. A man who killed for his own purposes, his own ends, was a man at the mercy of emotions, and such men made mistakes. The old Merrick had been a professional. He was detached, disengaged, or so he told himself, although in the quiet after the kill, he sometimes allowed himself to acknowledge the pleasure that it gave him.