John Connolly - The Lovers

And those were just the ones that had made it into the public arena. Wallace had already done more than a little snooping, and Parker’s name had been mentioned in connection with some business in upstate New York involving Russian mobsters, or so the story went. Mickey had managed to get a local cop in Massena to talk to him over some beers and quickly came to realize that something was being covered up in a big way, but when he tried to talk to the cop again the next day, Mickey was run out of town and warned, in no uncertain terms, never to come back. The trail had died after that, but Mickey’s curiosity had been piqued.

He could smell blood, and blood sold books.

E MILY K INDLER LEFT THElittle town in which she had been living for the past year shortly after the funeral for her deceased boyfriend’s parents. An open verdict was delivered as to the cause of their deaths, but it was understood in the town that they had taken their own lives, although Chief Dashut increasingly wondered why they had done so before they’d had a chance to bury their son properly. He couldn’t think of any parents who would not want to do right by their deceased child, no matter how traumatized they were by what had occurred. He questioned the verdict, both publicly and privately, and yoked the deaths of the parents to the murder of their son in both his mind and his own investigation.

There had been no denying that Emily Kindler’s shock at their deaths was genuine. One of the local doctors had been forced to give her a sedative to calm her down, and there were concerns for a time that she might have to be admitted to a psychiatric facility. She told the chief that she had visited the Faradays on the evening before they died, and Daniel Faraday in particular had appeared distressed, but there had been no indication that one or both of the Faradays might have been planning suicide.

The only lead so far in the killing of Bobby Faraday had come from the state police, who had discovered that Bobby had been involved in an altercation in a bar some eight miles from the town line, two weeks before his death. The bar in question was a roadside gin mill popular with bikers, and it seemed that Bobby, while intoxicated, had put the moves on a girl who was peripherally involved with the Crusaders biker gang. The Crusaders’ base was in Southern California, but their reach extended as far as Oklahoma and Georgia. Words had been exchanged, and a couple of punches thrown, before Bobby was dumped in the parking lot and given a kick in the ass to send him home. He was lucky not to have been stomped, but someone at the bar who knew Bobby had intervened on his behalf, arguing that he was just a kid who didn’t know any better, a kid, what’s more, who was hurting over the end of a relationship. Common sense had prevailed; well, common sense and the fortuitous arrival of a state police cruiser just as the Crusaders were debating the wisdom of giving Bobby some serious physical pain to distract him from his emotional distress. The Crusaders were bad, but the chief didn’t see them strangling a boy just because he’d crossed them. Still, the state police detectives seemed to feel that it was worth pursuing, and were now engaged in a game of catch-up with the Crusade Cth ”[1]ef rs, assisted by the FBI. In the meantime, Dashut had pointed out to the state police the symbol carved into the beech tree, and additional photographs had been taken, but he had heard nothing more about it.

Emily Kindler had been home alone at the time her boyfriend was believed to have been killed, which meant that she didn’t have an alibi, but that counted for half of the town too. The gas in the Faraday house had been turned on sometime after midnight and before 2 A.M., at best reckoning. Again, most of the people in town were home in bed at that time.

But the chief didn’t really suspect the Kindler girl of any involvement in Bobby Faraday’s death and, by extension, any suspicions that he had about how Bobby’s parents had met their end did not center on her, even though he considered the possibility of her involvement out of due diligence. When the chief had quietly mentioned Emily as a suspect to Homer Lockwood, the assistant ME, who was a resident in the town and knew both Emily and the Faradays by sight, the old man had just laughed.

“She doesn’t have the strength, not to do what was done to Bobby Faraday,” he told the chief. “Those aren’t arms of steel.”

So when Emily told the chief that she planned to leave town, he could hardly have blamed her. He did request that she notify him when she settled down somewhere, and keep him apprised of her movements for a time, and she agreed to do so, but he had no reason to prevent her from going. She gave the chief a cell phone number at which she could be contacted, and the address of a resort hotel in Miami where she intended to seek work as a waitress, and told him that she would be willing to return at any time if she could be of help in the investigation, but when Dashut eventually tried to contact her, the cell phone number was no longer in use, and the manager of the Miami resort told him that she had never taken up his offer of a job.

Emily Kindler, it seemed, had vanished.

Emily headed northeast. She wanted to smell the sea, to clear her senses. She wanted to try to shake whatever was shadowing her. It had found her in that small midwestern town, though, and it had taken the Faradays. It would find her again, she knew, but she wasn’t prepared simply to lie down in a dark corner and wait for it to happen. In the distance, Canada beckoned.

Men looked at her as she sat on the Greyhound bus, watching the monotonous flat landscape gradually transform into gentle hills, snow still thick upon them. A guy in a worn leather jacket who smelled of sweat and pheromones tried to talk to her at one of the rest stops, but she turned away from him and resumed her seat behind the driver, a man in his late fifties who sensed her vulnerability but, unlike others, had no intention of exploiting it. Instead, he had taken her under his wing, and glared balefully at any male below the age of seventy who threatened to take the empty seat beside the girl. When the man in the leather jacket got back on the bus and seemed intent on changing seats to be closer to the object of his interest, the driver told him to sit his ass back down and not to move again until they hit Boston.

Still, the man’s attentions made Emily think of Bobby, and she felt tears well. She had not loved him, but she had liked him. He was funny and sweet and awkward, at least until he started drinking, when some of his anger and frustration at his father, the small town, even her, would bubble to the surface.

Bupond

She had never been entirely sure what she wanted in a man. Sometimes, she thought that she caught some inkling of it, a brief flash of what she sought, like a light briefly glimpsed in the darkness. She would respond to it, and then the man would respond in turn. Sometimes it had been too late for her to retreat, and she had suffered the consequences: verbal abuse, sometimes even physical violence, and, on one occasion, very nearly worse than that.

Like some young men and women her age, she had struggled to find a sense of purpose. The path that she wanted her life to take had not yet become clear to her. She thought that she might become an artist, or a writer, for she loved books and paintings and music. In big cities, she would while away hours in museums and galleries, standing before the great canvases as though she hoped that by doing so she might be absorbed into them, becoming one with their world. When she could afford it, she would buy books. When money was not so freely available, she would go to a library, although the experience of reading a book that she could not call her own was not the same. Still, they gave her a sense of possibility so that she did not feel so lost, so adrift in the world. Others had struggled with some of the same problems that she had, and they had endured.