‘I’ve been on my feet for seven hours, I got a second job that starts at nine in the morning, and I have an eight-month-old baby at home who’s set to start crying in three hours’ time. If you don’t get right with the Lord, I’m going to knock you to the ground and feed your nuts to squirrels, you understand?’
She had a way about her. It wasn’t exactly tough love, but it was tough something.
Walsh was suitably chastened. ‘I understand, ma’am.’
‘You see a ring on this finger? Am I fifty? Do I look like a “ma’am” to you?’
‘No, ma’am – miss.’
‘You know, sometimes I hate this job,’ she said. ‘Give me a hand with him.’
With her on one side and me on the other, we guided Walsh to my car and laid him on the backseat. He mumbled an apology, told Tina that she was better than any man deserved, then promptly fell asleep.
‘He’s had a bad week,’ I said.
‘I know that. I heard you talking about that missing girl. You going to look after him?’
‘I’ll see that he gets a bed for the night.’
‘You’d better. And you’d better help him find that girl too.’
She spun on her heel and stomped to her car. I followed her lights for a time along a road overhung by bare trees, and her presence gave me consolation until she turned west and was lost to me. From the seat behind, I heard Walsh whisper, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I did not know to whom he was speaking.
Randall Haight was still wearing the same clothes that he had worn during his interview with the police that morning. Beside him was a bottle of scotch that a client had given to him as a Christmas gift four years earlier, and which had not been opened until that evening. Randall did not drink very much at the best of times, and preferred wine when he did. Even then, he tended to limit himself to one or two glasses. The girl did not like him to drink more than that.
But the girl was gone.
He was lost in his own house without her. She had been with him for so long that he had grown accustomed to her presence. His fear of her had become a facet of his existence. In its way, it had provided him with an outlet, a focus for other, more abstract concerns: his dread of exposure, of being returned to prison, of the unraveling of the web of half-truths in which he had secured his personality. Without her, he was too much alone with himself.
But he was also afraid of allowing himself to countenance that her torment of him might now be at an end. Perhaps even entities like her grew tired of their games. He could not bring himself to call her a ghost, for he did not believe in ghosts, a peculiar exercise in logic that even Randall admitted was unlikely to bear the weight of close intellectual scrutiny, but which nonetheless permitted him to regard her as a peculiar manifestation of primal energy, a version of the same energy that had fed the fatal attack on her all those decades ago. He knew there were professionals who, had he admitted to them that the specter of a dead girl shared his house, would have fallen back on Psychology 101 and interrogated him about his feelings of guilt and regret. Randall would then have been forced to lie to them, just as he had lied throughout his period of incarceration, and in the years that followed his release. Randall was a good liar, which made him a better actor. He could feign a whole range of emotions – repentance, humility, even love – to the extent that he was no longer always able to distinguish the counterfeit feeling from the genuine, even as he expressed it.
He was sure of the veracity of one emotional response as he sat in his favorite chair: He was furious. He was furious at the lawyer, and at the private detective. He was furious at his forced exposure, and that the potential danger posed by Anna Kore’s mobster uncle had been kept from him. He was furious at whoever was responsible for taunting him about his past. He was furious at the town of Pastor’s Bay for failing to shield him from the vile regard of an enemy.
And he was furious at the girl: furious at her for haunting him for so long, and now for leaving him.
He drank some more of the whisky. He wasn’t enjoying it but he felt that it was more appropriate to his mood than wine. His stomach growled. He had not eaten in many hours, but he wanted liquor more than food. He would suffer for it in the morning.
Randall reached for the phone and dialed the lawyer’s number. He had been reconsidering his relationship with her all day, debating the consequences of his actions back and forth, and the booze had tipped the balance. Time was running out. He knew that. Soon he would be forced to shed his current identity and find another. The presence of the lawyer and the detective in his life would only make that more difficult. He left a message informing her that he would no longer require her services, or those of the detective. Neither would he be needing the dubious protective presence of the two idiots who were supposed to shield him if the necessity arose, assuming they could get their fat asses in gear in time. He was coldly polite as he thanked the lawyer for all that she had done for him, requested that a final bill be sent to him at her convenience, and hung up the phone with a sense of empowerment. He had started withdrawing all of his money from his accounts as soon as the taunting messages began to arrive, and he now had $15,000 in cash on hand. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. The house he would just have to abandon for now. He’d figure out what to do with it later. He’d have to inform Chief Allan that he was leaving, just so he was all square with the law. He and Allan had always got along well in a cordial, professional way. He’d tell Allan that he was frightened and wanted to keep some distance from Pastor’s Bay until the Kore case was concluded, if it ever was. He might even spend a couple of nights in a nice inn before quietly heading elsewhere: Canada, perhaps. This time, he’d try losing himself in a big city.
The knock on the back door startled him so much that he tipped over the side table, and the bottle of whisky began to empty itself on the rug. He picked it up before it could do too much damage, then screwed on the cap and held the bottle by the neck, brandishing it like a club.
The knock came again.
‘Who’s there?’ he called, but there was no reply. He went into the kitchen. There was a glass panel on the locked door, but he could see nobody outside, and the motion sensor that turned on the night light above the door had not been activated. He wished that he had a gun, but the nature of the gun laws meant that it wasn’t possible for him to acquire one without complications, and he had never had a reason to seek out an illegal weapon. He put down the bottle and took a carving knife from the rack. He glanced out the kitchen window and saw, on the back lawn, the figure of the girl. She cast no shadow, despite the light from the waning crescent moon, for she was barely more than a shadow herself. She raised her right hand and beckoned to him with her index finger, and he was about to open the door when another figure caught his attention.
There was a man standing behind her, between the twin willows at the end of his garden. Their almost bare branches hung so low that their shape and his became one, so that he seemed a construct of bark and twigs and brown, dying leaves. The man did not move and Randall could not see his face, but Randall still knew who he was. After all, they had both had a hand in the death of Selina Day.
Randall backed away from the door. The girl could no longer be seen on the lawn, and now the knocking came once more.
Tap-tap-tap.
She was at the door once again. Come out. Come out, come out, because time is pressing, and a friend has arrived, just as you always knew that he would. You can’t hide from him, just as you can’t hide from me. Running won’t help, not now. The end is approaching, the reckoning.
Tap-tap-tap.
Come out. Don’t make us come in there to get you.
Tap-tap-TAP.
He retreated to the living room, and watched the figure of the man appear against the glass, the girl beside him, and the doorknob turning – once, twice – but still the motion-activated light did not come on. Randall picked up the phone and tried to call the police, but there was only an empty, whooshing noise from the receiver, like a fierce wind blowing across barren peaks. This was not the sound of a dead line. The phone was still connected, except now it was connected to someplace else, somewhere deep and dark and very far away.
The shapes of the man and the girl disappeared. The line cleared. The voice of the emergency operator asked him what service he required, but he did not answer. After a couple of seconds he dropped the phone back into its cradle and slowly sank to the floor. The girl could have come in. She didn’t need doors or windows. Why didn’t she enter?
The answer was that the girl had a new friend, a special friend.
And Randall saw, in the night sky, the flickering of long-dead stars.