John Connolly - Nocturnes

They were getting older, I realized. We all were. True, the changes in Angel, the new pain lines in his face and the creeping gray in his previously soot-black hair, were too sudden to go unnoticed, but his partner was also graying slightly. Louis’s satanic beard was slowly speckling with white, and there was now also a considerable dusting of it in his hair. He caught me looking at him.

“What?” he said.

“You’re going seriously gray,” I said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Hate to break it to you.”

“Like I said, I believe you’re mistaken.”

“You can take steps. You don’t have to just sit back and let it happen.”

“I don’t have to sit back and do nothin’, because there’s nothin’ to let happen.”

“Okay, if you say so. But you know, you let that hair grow out some and you can sign on as Morgan Freeman’s stunt double.”

“He has a point,” chipped in Angel. “Morgan ain’t as young as he used to be. Studios would probably pay good money for a younger guy who just looks as old as Morgan Freeman.”

Louis stopped at the door leading out of the terminal building.

“You going to sulk?” I asked him.

“Maybe he’s just forgotten where he’s going. That happens as you get-”

For an older man, Angel could still move pretty quickly when he wanted to, so Louis’s Cole Haan missed him by an inch.

The first time.

We sat at a table in the Bayou Kitchen, a tiny little diner over on Deering that until recently had only opened for lunch but now did weekend dinners as well. It could seat maybe twenty people, and its counter was piled high with sauces that carried warnings advising that they shouldn’t be used by pregnant women or people with heart complaints. The food was good, and in winter it was mainly locals who went there.

Angel was still rubbing his shin occasionally and casting hurt glances at Louis, so it was left to me to do most of the talking. I told them a little more of the history of the Grady house, and about my encounters with Chief Grass, Denny Maguire, and Gunnar Tillman’s boy, among others.

“You sure Maguire’s clean?” asked Louis.

“I didn’t get anything bad from him.”

“You tell Matheson about him?”

“No.”

I had spoken with Matheson that morning. He told me that he had a key for the basement in the house, and he thought that the cops had one too, but he hadn’t realized that there was no copy on the set of keys he had given to me. He promised to get one to me by the end of the day. He also told me that he’d had a shouting match with Chief Grass after Grass had questioned the wisdom of hiring me.

“Matheson is edgy enough as it is,” I said. “The last thing I need is for him to start bothering Maguire about the past.”

“What about Czabo?”

“I’d call him a suspect, but there hasn’t been a crime. Still, the photo in the mailbox isn’t his style. He’s a watcher, not a doer.”

“And the antiques guy?”

“The Collector?” I had begun to think of him by that name. After all, I had no other. “He told me he had nothing to do with the photograph. He said he just wanted a mirror from the house, but he knows something.”

“Could be he’s a grave robber, like Voodoo Ray,” said Angel.

“Maybe if you just gave him a mirror, he’d tell you what he knows,” suggested Louis.

“I don’t think so. Anyway, nothing in the house is mine to give away.”

“You think he’s a threat?”

I put my hands up in the air.

“A threat to what? To us? We haven’t done anything. For once, we’re free and clear. Nobody hates us on this case.”

“Yet,” said Angel.

“Always happens, though,” said Louis.

“If only they took the time to get to know us a little better,” said Angel.

“I’ve taken the time to get to know you a little better,” I said, “and look where it got me. You’re on the payroll, by the way, so it’s not a charity case. Matheson signed off on the surveillance.”

Louis finished off his jambalaya, soaking up the last of the sauce and rice with some fresh bread.

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes, was what he said. I told him we’d give it a week, then review our options.”

“Sounds like it could be nothing,” said Louis. “A photograph in a mailbox, that’s all you got?”

“That’s all.”

I reached into my pocket and removed a copy of the Matheson picture. I carefully unfolded it, then pushed it slowly across the table.

“But do you want to take the chance?”

The two men looked at the image of the young girl. Angel answered for both of them.

“No,” he said. “I guess not.”

Later that afternoon they stopped by the house to say hi to Rachel. She was a little distant, but neither of them remarked upon it. I thought that she was just tired after the night before, but it was the first sign of troubles to come. The pain and danger that she had endured by remaining with me, and the fears that she felt for herself and our child, seemed to her to be rendered more acute by the presence of two men who were friends yet who always carried with them a potential for violence. They reminded her of what had befallen her in the past, and what might befall the child she carried. Looking back, perhaps they also caused her to reflect on my own capacities, and the possibility that I might always draw violent men to me. She had attempted to explain these things to me before, and I had tried to reassure her as best I could. I hoped that, in time, her worries would fade. I think she hoped so too, even though she feared that they would not. I wanted to ask her again about the visit to the hospital, and the tears that followed, but there was no time. Instead, I held her and told her I’d be home before midnight, and she squeezed me and said that would be fine.

I drove to Two Mile Lake as the afternoon light began to dim, Angel and Louis following behind. It was dark by the time we arrived, and the bare trees slept over us as we passed the Grady house and took the next turning on the right. The road led up to a run-down, single-storey farmhouse. Like the Grady house itself, it had been bought by Matheson after his daughter’s disappearance. It seemed to me that he wanted to seal off the whole area from the possible depredations of strangers, as though his loss were inextricably tied up with the very fabric of the Grady house, with its surrounding fields and with the buildings that had silently borne witness to the events that had occurred in their purview. Perhaps he envisaged her, lost and alone, desperately trying to seek a doorway back into the world that she knew, and felt that any change to the place from which she had vanished would make it impossible for her to return; or maybe this was all simply one great monument, an ornate offering upon which her name and the names of the other children were deeply inscribed yet never seen.

I opened the door to the farmhouse and led Angel and Louis inside. It had been cleaned recently, for there was little dust on any of the surfaces. Most of the rooms remained empty, apart from the kitchen, where there was a table and four chairs, and the sitting room, which contained a sofa bed and a radiator. In one of the bedrooms there were some ladders and tins of varnish and paint. An envelope on the table, addressed to me, contained a set of keys to the Grady house for Angel and Louis, and a single key with a note from Matheson identifying it as the one for the basement.

“Nice,” said Angel, as he took in his surroundings. “Very minimalist.”

“Who knows that we’re here?” asked Louis.

“We do, and so does Matheson.”