Chapter XXXII
A ngel and I stood silently in the house, unwilling to move or speak. Louis remained frozen in the doorway, his hands outstretched from his sides to show the man beyond that they were empty.
“You come out slowly now,” said the voice. “You can put your hands on your head. Them fellas inside can do the same. You won’t see me, but I can see you. I tell you now, just one of you moves, and Slick here in his fancy coat will have a hole where his face used to be. You’re trespassing on private property. Might be that you have guns too. Not a judge in the state will convict if you make me kill you while you’re armed.”
Louis slowly stepped out of the doorway and stood with his hands on the back of his head, facing out into the woods. With no choice, Angel and I followed. I tried to find the source of the voice, but there was only silence as we stepped from the shelter of the house. Then a man emerged from a grove of fetterbush and hoptree. He was dressed in green camouflage pants and a matching jacket, and armed with a Browning 12-gauge. He was in his early fifties, big but not muscular. His face was pale and his hair was too long, squatting untidily on his head like a filthy mop. He didn’t look as if he had slept properly in a long time. His eyes were almost falling out of his head, as though the pressure on his skull was too much for them to bear, and the sockets were so rimmed with red that the skin seemed to be slowly peeling away from the flesh beneath. There were fresh sores on his cheeks, chin, and neck, flecked with red where he had cut them as he tried to shave.
“Who are you?” he said. He held the gun steady, but his voice trembled, as though he could project confidence only physically or vocally, but not both at once.
“Hunters,” I replied.
“Yeah?” He sneered at us. “And what do you hunt without a rifle?”
“Men,” said Louis simply.
Another crack opened in the man’s veneer. I had a vision of the skin beneath his clothing crisscrossed with tiny fractures, like a china doll on the verge of shattering into a thousand pieces.
“Are you Caswell?” I asked.
“Who’s asking?”
“My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. These are my colleagues.”
“My name’s Caswell all right, and this is my land. You got no business being here.”
“In a way, our business is exactly why we’re here.”
“You got business, you take it to a store.”
“We wanted to ask you some questions.”
Caswell raised the muzzle of the gun slightly and fired off a round. It went some distance over our heads, but I still flinched. He jacked another load, and the eye of the gun maintained its unblinking vigil on us once again.
“I don’t think you heard me. You’re in no position to ask questions.”
“Talk to us, or talk to the police. It’s your choice.”
Caswell’s hands worked on the grip and stock of the rifle. “The hell are you talking about? I got no problems with the police.”
“Did you fix up this house?” I indicated the building behind us.
“What if I did? It’s my land.”
“Seems like a curious thing to do, fixing up a ruin in a deserted village.”
“There’s no law against it.”
“No, I guess not. Might be a law against what was done in it, though.”
I was taking a chance. Caswell might try to shoot us just for goading him, but I didn’t think so. He didn’t look the type. Despite the shotgun and the camo clothing, there was something soft about him, as though someone had just armed the Pillsbury Doughboy.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but he retreated a step from us.
“I mean what was done in Gilead,” I lied, “and those children who were killed.”
A peculiar range of emotions played themselves out in dumb show upon Caswell’s face. There was shock first of all, then fear, followed by a slow-dawning realization that I was talking about the distant, not the recent, past. I watched with satisfaction as he tried unsuccessfully to disguise his relief. He knew. He knew what had happened to Lucy Merrick.
“Yeah,” he said. “I reckon so. That’s why I try to keep folks away from here. Never know what kind of people it might attract.”
“Sure,” I said. “And what kind of people might they be?”
Caswell didn’t manage to answer the question. He had talked himself into a corner, and now he planned to bluster his way out.
“People, that’s all,” he said.
“Why did you buy this place, Mr. Caswell? It seems like an odd thing to have done, given all that happened here.”
“There’s no law against a man buying property. I’ve lived up here all my life. The land came cheap, on account of its history.”
“And its history didn’t trouble you?”
“No, it didn’t trouble me one bit. Now—”
I didn’t let him finish. “I’m just wondering, because something is clearly troubling you. You don’t look well. You look kind of stressed, to tell the truth. In fact, you seem downright frightened.”
I’d hit the bull’s-eye. The truth of what I had said manifested itself in Caswell’s reaction. The little cracks opened wider and deeper, and the gun tilted slightly toward the ground. I could sense Louis considering his options, his body tensing as he prepared to draw on Caswell.
“No,” I whispered, and Louis relaxed without question.
Caswell became aware of the impression he was creating. He drew himself up straight and raised the stock of the gun to his shoulder, sighting down the barrel, the slatted rib along the top of the Browning like the raised spine of an animal. I heard Louis give a low hiss, but I was no longer worried about Caswell. He was all front.
“I’m not scared of you,” he said. “Don’t make that mistake.”
“Then who are you scared of ?”
Caswell shook his head to free some drops of moisture that clung to the ends of his hair. “I think you’d better be getting back to your car, you and your ‘colleagues.’ Keep your hands on your head too while you do it, and don’t come around here again. You got your first and last warning.”
He waited for us to begin walking, then started to retreat into the woods.
“You ever hear of a Lucy Merrick, Mr. Caswell?” I called to him. I paused and looked back over my shoulder, still keeping my hands on my head.
“No,” he said. There was a pause before he spoke again, as though he were trying to convince himself that the name had not been spoken aloud. “I never heard that name before.”
“How about Daniel Clay?”
He shook his head. “Just walk on out of here. I’m done talking to you.”
“We’ll be back, Mr. Caswell. I think you know that.”
Caswell didn’t answer. He kept retreating, moving deeper and deeper into the forest, no longer caring if we were moving or not, just trying to put as much distance between himself and us as he could. I wondered who Caswell would call, once he was back in the safety of his own house. It didn’t matter anymore. We were close. For whatever reason, Caswell was falling apart, and I had every intention of speeding up the process.