This time, the woman rose to her full height, but she did not look around. Mobley advanced slightly, until his feet were almost at the water’s edge.
“I’m looking for a boat. You seen it?”
The woman was now completely still. Her head, thought Mobley, looked like it was too small for her body until he realized that she was completely bald. Beneath the robe, he could see traces of the scaling on her skull. He reached out a hand to touch her.
“I said-”
Mobley felt a huge pressure on the side of his left leg, and then it collapsed beneath his weight as he registered the gunshot. He toppled sideways, coming to rest half in, half out of the water, and stared down at the remains of his knee. The bullet had blown away his kneecap, and what lay inside was white and red. Already his blood was flowing into the Congaree. Mobley’s gritted teeth separated, and he howled in agony. He looked around for the shooter and a second bullet tore into the small of his back, nicking his spine on its way through his body. Mobley pitched sideways and lay on the ground, watching as a black pool spread around his legs. He found himself paralyzed, yet still capable of feeling the hurt that was colonizing every cell of his being.
Mobley heard footsteps approaching and swiveled his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak but something sharp entered his flesh below the chin, the hook cutting through the soft tissue and piercing his tongue and upper palate. The pain was beyond belief, an agony that superseded the burning in his lower body and leg. He tried to scream, but the hook now held his mouth closed and all he emitted was a harsh, croaking noise. The pressure increased as his head was jerked back and, slowly, he was pulled toward the forest. He could see the steel of the hook in front of his face, could taste it on his tongue and feel it against his teeth. He tried to raise a hand to grasp it, but he was already growing weak and his fingers could only brush the metal before falling down to his side. A gleaming trail of blood was being laid on the leaves and dirt. Above him, the canopy appeared like a black shroud across the sky. The forest gathered around him, and he stared for the last time toward the river as the woman dropped the sheet from her body and turned, naked, to look at him.
And deep inside himself, in the dark place where all that was truly Landron Mobley dreamed of visiting pain on others, a host of scaled women fell upon him, and he began to scream.
II
He gave no comfort, saved no one Adrift he moves by guilty moons…
– PINETOP SEVEN, “MISSION DISTRICT”
5
LOOKING BACK, I see a pattern in all that took place: a strange joining of disparate occurrences, a series of links between seemingly unconnected events stretching back into the past. I recall the honeycomb created by the imperfect layering of history, the proximity of what has gone before to that which now pertains, and I begin to understand. We are trapped not only by our own history but by the histories of all those with whom we choose to share our lives. Angel and Louis brought their pasts with them, as did Elliot Norton, as did I, and so it should have come as no surprise that just as current lives became interwoven, impacting on one another, so too pasts began to exert their pull, dragging innocent and guilty alike down beneath the earth, drowning them in brackish water, tearing them apart among the swollen buttresses of the Congaree.
And in Thomaston, the first link lay waiting to be uncovered.
The maximum security facility at Thomaston, Maine, looked reassuringly like a prison; at least, it looked reassuring as long as you weren’t a prisoner there. Anyone arriving in Thomaston with the prospect of long-term incarceration in his future was likely to feel his spirits sink at his first sight of the jail. It had high, imposing walls and the kind of solidity that came from being burned down and rebuilt a couple of times since it was first opened in the 1820s. Thomaston had been selected as the site for the state prison since it was roughly halfway up the coast and accessible by boat for the transportation of inmates, but it was now nearing the end of its working life. A Supermax facility known as the MCI, or Maine Correctional Institution, had been opened in Warren in 1992. It was designed to house the worst offenders in a state of near permanent lockdown, along with those prisoners with serious behavioral problems, and the new state prison would eventually be added on an adjoining tract of land. Until then, Thomaston was still home to about four hundred men, one of whom, since his suicide attempt, was now the preacher, Aaron Faulkner.
I recalled Rachel’s response when she heard that Faulkner had apparently tried to take his own life.
“It doesn’t fit,” she said. “He’s not that type.”
“So why did he do it? It’s hardly a cry for help.”
She chewed at her lip. “If he did it, he did it to further some aim. According to the newspaper reports, the wounds in his arms were deep, but not so deep that he was in immediate danger. He cut veins, not arteries. That’s not the action of a man who really wants to die. For some reason, he wanted out of Supermax. The question is, why?”
Now it seemed that I might have the opportunity to pose that question to the man himself.
I drove up to Thomaston after Angel and Louis had left for New York. I parked in a visitor’s space outside the main gate, then entered the reception area and gave my name to the sergeant of the guards at the desk. Behind him, and beyond the metal detector, was a wall of tinted reinforced glass concealing the main control room for the prison, where alarms, video cameras, and visitors were constantly monitored. The control room looked down on the visitation room to which, under ordinary circumstances, I would have been led for a face-to-face meeting with any of the men incarcerated in the facility.
Except these were not ordinary circumstances, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner was far from being an ordinary prisoner.
Another guard arrived to escort me. I passed through the metal detector, attached my pass to my jacket, and was led to the elevator and the administration level on the third floor. This section of the prison was termed “soft side”: no prisoners were permitted here without escort, and it was separated from “hard side” by a system of dual air-locking doors that could not be opened simultaneously, so that even if a prisoner managed to get through the first door, the second would remain closed.
The colonel of the guards and the prison warden were both waiting for me in the warden’s office. The prison had swung between various regimes over the past thirty years: from strict discipline, rigidly enforced, through an ill-fated campaign of liberalism, disliked by the longer-serving guards, until finally it had settled at a midpoint that erred on the side of conservatism. In other words, the prisoners no longer spit at visitors and it was safe to walk through the general population, which was fine by me.
A bugle call sounded, indicating the end of rec time, and through the windows I could see blue-garbed prisoners begin to move across the yards toward their cells. Thomaston enclosed an area of eight or nine acres, including Haller Field, the prison’s playing field, its walls carved out of sheer rock. Unmarked, in a far corner beneath the walls, was the old execution site.
The warden offered me coffee, then played nervously with his own cup, spinning it around the table by its handle. The colonel of the guards, who was almost as imposing as the prison itself, remained standing and silent. If he was as uneasy as the warden, then he didn’t show it. His name was Joe Long and his face displayed all the emotion of a cigar store Indian.
“You understand that this is highly unusual, Mr. Parker,” the warden began. “Visits are usually conducted in the visiting area, not through the bars of a cell. And we rarely have the attorney general’s office calling to request that we facilitate alternative arrangements.” He stopped talking and waited for me to respond.