‘And her?’
The woman had not moved from her station by the window. Although young, her hair was a platinum color that had not come from a bottle, and her porcelain skin bore the faintest of sheens. Even her eyes were gray. Dobey imagined taking a knife to her and watching it glance harmlessly off, leaving only the minutest of scratches.
‘If she ever had a proper name,’ said Quayle, ‘it’s lost even to her. Let’s test your knowledge to establish if you’re truly a scholar, or simply a salesman. Were you to be informed that one had chosen to christen her “Pallida,” what surname might you ascribe in turn?’
Dobey stared Quayle in the face as he replied.
‘Mors.’
Quayle slowly clapped his hands in appreciation.
‘Very impressive. Have I missed Horace on your shelves?’
‘Behind your head.’
Quayle turned and perused the shelves until he spotted an aged copy of the Carmina.
‘You are,’ he said softly, ‘a most unexpected delight, but I fear that you may yet be required to concede the aptness of her nomenclature. She is death’s very personification.’
Dobey folded his hands in his lap.
‘You talk fancy,’ he said. ‘My father told me never to trust a man who talked fancy.’
‘Most wise. And I admire your equanimity, or perhaps you think I’m joking about the imminence of your mortality?’
‘I’ve seen your faces. I know what’s coming. Maybe I should tell you both to go fuck yourselves. In fact, why don’t I just do that? You and the tin woman over there can go fuck yourselves six ways to Sunday.’
‘Well,’ said Quayle, ‘allow me to explain why that’s not going to happen. You’re not the only one to have seen my face this evening. You’re one of four, counting your staff but excluding your hayseed customers, and it’ll be five if you also force me to pay a visit to Ms Bachmeier, the lady whom I believe shares both your vocation and your bed. If you tell me what I want to know, none of them will ever be troubled by us. If you don’t, then later tonight my colleague will gut your friend Carlos and bury the widow Bachmeier alive. And I liked the waitress – not the one who served me, but the other. I saw the way she looked at you. She’s fond of you, and you of her. Not in any improper way, of course, but I could discern the bond between you. Leila: that was her name. I saw it on her badge. I’ve never had a predilection for rape, but in her case I’ll make an exception. When I’m done with her, I’ll let Mors start cutting.’
Dobey closed his eyes.
‘How do I know you’re not going to kill them anyway?’
‘If we were going to do that, we’d have started with Carlos while he was standing on your doorstep.’
‘Aren’t you afraid of being identified?’
‘Mr Dobey, I’ve been doing this for a very long time, longer than you can imagine. A great many people have seen me, some of them under similar circumstances to your hired help, yet I have endured, and so I remain unconcerned. My colleague’s face, on the other hand, tends to be the last that anyone sees.’
Quayle placed a hand on Dobey’s knee and gripped it gently, a gesture that was equal parts reassurance and threat.
‘The name of the girl we seek – the woman, if you prefer – is Karis Lamb.’
8
Far to the northeast, a warm, hard rain began to fall, working at compacted snow and stubborn ice. As the water did its work, the white seas parted in fissures to reveal the greens and browns beneath. Ground grown hard slowly softened, and the sound of the rain called to bud and branch, seed and root.
It called to buried things.
9
Outside of exceptional circumstances, Dobey rarely asked how the waifs came by his number, or by what means they knew where to find him. It wasn’t as though he advertised, leaving his card tucked in the masonry at street corners, or slotted behind restroom mirrors. But as the years went by, he came to understand that those whom he helped find their way to somewhere better often considered it part of their duty to assist others in turn (‘There’s this guy in Indiana …’), while friends and associates of Esther also filed away his number and location, to be passed on when required.
What made him special – no, Dobey would correct himself (because vanity, preying on a weak mind, produces every sort of mischief), what made his position special – was that he wasn’t part of the regular web of charities and shelters. He stood at one remove from them, and so provided a particular place of refuge for those who, for whatever reason, were not yet ready to be absorbed into the system.
But he was aware of how it had all begun.
The girl was sitting on the bench outside the CVS on Cadillac’s Main Street, her backpack at her feet, her hands buried deep in her coat pockets against the cold. A faded sign attached to the streetlight beside her proclaimed this to be the location of a bus stop, but no bus had passed through Cadillac in two years, not since funding cuts did away with the route. The girl, unfamiliar to Dobey, was probably in her late teens, but her face wasn’t developing at the same pace as the rest of her, and so was still that of a child. She was pretty, going on beautiful, but hers was a fragile grace, easily broken. Perhaps that was why Dobey stopped. Had she been harder looking, he might have kept on driving, and his life would have taken a different direction.
By then Dobey was in his early fifties, and knew that he would never be a father. He’d come close to marriage a couple of times, but the final step proved difficult in each case, once because of him and once because of the other party. He had no regrets about this; better the doubts and difficulties manifest themselves before rather than after the ceremony. Had they been surmountable, he might, once again, have found himself on another journey. But now the widow Bachmeier was circling, and a chaste dance that had commenced during her husband’s final illness was about to become a more intimate engagement.
Even allowing for the girl’s delicacy, Dobey was still tempted to continue on his way and let someone else take care of her, a body better equipped to deal with a teenage girl. He was also aware that the last thing a young woman in trouble wanted was for some overweight, middle-aged guy in a truck to pull up and offer help. At the very least she’d have the right to be cautious, and if she had any sense, she’d start shouting to high heaven until the cops came.
Yet if everyone took that view, the pathways of the world would be littered with the remains of even more of the poor and the lost than they already were, and Dobey didn’t want to be responsible for adding another casualty to the list; not that day, and not any day. So he turned back, stopped a little ahead of the girl, and got out of his truck. Now that the decision had been made, he wasn’t sure of the correct distance to maintain, or what to do with his hands, and he wondered if her proximity and prettiness had somehow caused him to regress to adolescence.
The girl flicked a sideways glance in Dobey’s direction, like an animal sensing the approach of a possible threat, signaling awareness as a prelude to possible flight.
‘Did someone tell you this was a bus stop?’ Dobey asked.
The girl’s shoulders sagged, and her eyes briefly closed. She already knew, without being told more, that she’d been fed a crock of shit. It was just a matter of waiting to see if an attempt would soon be made to offer her a second helping.
‘You saying it’s not?’
‘The bus company says it’s not. I don’t have much influence either way.’
‘Then why is the sign still up there?’
‘That,’ said Dobey, ‘is a very good question. The answer, I guess, is that either nobody cared enough to take it down, or somebody cared too much.’
The girl hid her mouth inside the collar of her coat and stared north. During the course of their brief conversation, she had yet to look directly at Dobey.
‘Where are you trying to get to?’ he asked.
‘Chicago.’
‘You have family there?’
‘A friend.’