All was movement. The pieces were on the board, and that night the game would reach its conclusion.
From her bedroom window, Karen Emory watched Joel Tobias leave. He had said a cursory good-bye to her, and kissed her with dry lips upon the cheek. She had held him tightly, even as she felt him pull away from her, and before she let him go, her fingertips touched against the gun at his back.
Tobias took the Silverado and drove north, but only as far as Falmouth, where the others were waiting with the van and two motorcycles. Vernon and Pritchard, the ex-Marines, constituted the main sniper team. Beside them stood Mallak and Bacci. Vernon and Pritchard were both big men, and even though the former was black, and the latter white, they were brothers beneath the skin. Tobias didn’t care for either of them, but that was at least as much about the mutual antipathy that existed between soldiers and Marines as it was about Vernon’s seeming inability to open his mouth without asking a question, and loading it with attitude.
‘Where are Twizell and Greenham?’ asked Vernon, referring to the second sniper team.
‘They’ll join us later,’ said Tobias. ‘They have something else to do first.’
‘Shit,’ said Vernon in reply. ‘Don’t suppose you feel like sharing the details with the troops?’
‘No,’ said Tobias, and held Vernon’s gaze until the other looked away.
Mallak and Bacci, who had served in Tobias’s squad in Iraq, exchanged a glance, but didn’t intervene. They knew better than to take sides in the ongoing pissing competition between Vernon and the sarge. Mallak had come home a corporal, and never questioned orders, even though he recognized that there was now a growing distance between Tobias and him. Tobias had grown strange in recent weeks, and pragmatic to the point of cruelty. It was Tobias who had suggested that the detective, Parker, should be disposed of entirely, and not simply questioned to find out what he knew. Mallak had argued for discretion, and had subsequently taken responsibility for the detective’s interrogation. He wasn’t in the business of killing Americans on home soil, or anywhere else. The climbdown over Parker was a small victory, and nothing more: Mallak had decided to pretend that he knew nothing about the death of Foster Jandreau, or any other actions.
Bacci, meanwhile, was a bald thug who just wanted his money, and was lucky that Tobias had not yet punched his lights out for the way he looked at Karen Emory.
We’re just one big happy family, thought Mallak, and the sooner all this is over, the better.
‘All right,’ said Tobias. ‘Let’s move out.’
Meanwhile, two men headed north in an anonymous brown sedan, passing Lewiston and Augusta and Waterville, Bangor slowly drawing nearer. One of them, the passenger, had a computer on his lap. Occasionally, he would refresh the map screen, but the blinking dot never moved.
‘That thing still working?’ asked Twizell.
‘Looks like it,’ said Greenham. He kept his eye on the blinking dot. It stayed close to the intersection of Palm and Stillwater, not far from the home of Bobby Jandreau. ‘We’ve got a sitting target,’ he confirmed, and Twizell grunted in satisfaction.
As Greenham and Twizell passed Lewiston, Rojas, still a little fuzzy from some recently administered dental anesthetic, and his teeth now aching, was sitting at a table working on the slab of red oak that would serve as a platform for the ornate seals. They lay beside him on a piece of black cloth as he worked, their presence a source of comfort to him, a reminder of the potential for beauty in this world.
And Herod drove north, drawing closer and closer to Rojas, grateful for the Captain’s absence, grateful that his pain was tolerable, for now. And as he went, another closed in on him.
For the Collector, too, was on the move.
III
Q: What were you firing at?
A: At the enemy, sir.
Q: At people?
A: At the enemy, sir.
Q: They weren’t even human beings?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Were they men?
A: I don’t know, sir . . .
Testimony of Lieutenant William Calley, the My Lai Courts-Martial, 1970
23
The Rangeley Lakes region of the state, north-west of Portland, east of the New Hampshire state line and just south of the Canadian border, was not one with which I was very familiar. It was best known as a sportsman’s paradise, and had been since the nineteenth century. I had never had much cause to go there, although I had a vague recollection of passing through it as a boy, my parents in the front seats of my father’s beloved LeSabre, on our way to somewhere else: Canada, perhaps, because I can’t imagine my father going all that way to visit eastern New Hampshire. He always regarded New Hampshire as suspect, for some reason that I never fully grasped, but it is so long ago now, and my parents are no longer around to ask.
I did have one other memory of Rangeley, and that came from a man named Phineas Arbogast, who was a friend of my grandfather and sometimes hunted in the woods around Rangeley, where his family had a cabin and, it seems, had always had a cabin, for Phineas Arbogast was ‘Old Maine’ and could probably have traced his ancestry back to the nomads who crossed from Asia into North America eleven thousand years before over the spit of land that is now the Bering Islands, or at least to some pigheaded pilgrim who had headed north to escape the worst rigors of Puritanism. As a boy, I had found his speech almost unintelligible, for Phineas could have drawled for his country. He could even find ways to lengthen a word that didn’t have any vowels to lengthen. He could have drawled in Polish.
My grandfather was fond of Phineas who, if he could be pinned down, and understood, was a mine of historical and geographical knowledge. As he grew older, some of that knowledge inevitably began to leach from his brain, and he tried to put it down in a book before it all trickled away, but he didn’t have the patience for the task. He was part of an older, oral tradition: he told his stories aloud so that others might remember them and pass them on in turn, but eventually the only ones who would listen to him were people nearly as old as he was. Young people didn’t want to hear Phineas’s stories, not then, and by the time some people from one of the universities came looking for people like him to record their tales, Phineas was telling his stories late at night to his neighbors in the churchyard.
So the memory I have is of Phineas and my grandfather sitting by the fire, Phineas talking, my grandfather listening. My father was dead by then, my mother elsewhere that night, so it was we three only, warming ourselves by the winter logs. My grandfather had asked Phineas why he didn’t go to his cabin so much anymore, and Phineas had paused before answering. It wasn’t his usual pause, a moment to draw breath and compose his thoughts before starting out along a rambling anecdotal path. No, there was uncertainty and – could it be? – an unwillingness to proceed. So my grandfather waited, curious, and so did I, and eventually Phineas Arbogast told us why he no longer went to his cabin in the woods near Rangeley.
He had been hunting squirrel with his dog, Misty, a mutt whose ancestry was as complex as that of some royal families, and who duly carried herself like a bastard princess. Phineas had no use for the squirrels that he shot: he just didn’t care much for squirrels. Misty, as usual, had gone racing ahead, and after a time Phineas could no longer see or hear her. He whistled for her, but she didn’t return, and Misty, despite her airs, was an obedient dog. So Phineas went searching for her, moving deeper and deeper into the woods, and farther and farther from his cabin. It began to grow dark, and still he searched, for he was not going to leave her alone in the forest. He called her name, over and over, to no reply. He began to fear that a bear might have taken her, or a lynx or bobcat, until at last he thought that he heard Misty whining, and he followed the sound, grateful that he still had most of his hearing and more of his eyesight, even at seventy-three.
He came to a clearing, and there was Misty, now barely visible as the moon appeared in the sky. Briars had wound themselves around her legs and her muzzle, and as she had struggled against them the briars had tightened on her, so that all she could do was whimper softly. Phineas drew his knife, preparing to free her, when there was movement to his right, and he turned his flashlight in that direction.
A little girl of perhaps six or seven stood at the edge of the clearing. Her hair was dark, and she was very pale. She wore a black dress of coarse cloth, and simple black shoes on her feet. She didn’t blink in the strong beam of the flashlight, nor did she raise her hands to shield her eyes. In fact, Phineas thought, the light seemed to make no difference to her whatsoever; it was as if she merely absorbed it into her skin, for she appeared to glow whitely from within.
‘Honey,’ said Phineas, ‘what are you doing way out here?’
‘I’m lost,’ said the girl. ‘Help me.’
Her voice sounded strange, as though it were coming from inside a cave, or the hollowed-out trunk of a tree. It echoed when it should not have done so.
Phineas moved toward her, already shrugging his coat off to put it over her shoulders, when he saw Misty tugging at the briars again, her tail now wedged between her back legs. The effort clearly caused her pain, but still she was determined to break free. When her attempt continued to prove fruitless, she faced the girl and growled. Phineas could see the dog trembling in the moonlight, and the hackles on her neck were raised. When he looked back, the girl had retreated a couple of feet, moving a little deeper into the woods.
‘Help me,’ she repeated. ‘I’m lost, and I’m lonely.’
Phineas was wary now, although he could not have said why, beyond the girl’s pallor and the effect her presence was having on his dog, yet still he walked toward her, and as he did so she moved a little farther away, until at last the clearing was at his back, and there was only forest before him: forest, and the dim form of the girl among the trees. Phineas lowered his torch, but the girl did not fade into the shadows of the forest. Instead, she continued to luminesce faintly, and although Phineas could see his own breath pluming thickly before him, no such cloud emerged from the girl’s mouth, not even as she spoke again.
‘Please, I’m lonely and I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’
Now she raised her hand, beckoning to him, and he saw the dirt beneath her fingernails, as though she had clawed her way out of some dark spot, a hiding place of earth, and worms, and scuttling bugs.
‘No, honey,’ said Phineas. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere with you.’
Without taking his eyes from her, he backed away until he was beside Misty, and then he squatted and began to hack at the briars. They came away reluctantly, and they were sticky to the touch. Even as he cut at them, he thought that he felt others begin to curl around his boots, but later he told himself that it was probably just his mind playing tricks on him, as if that one small detail might make up for the far greater trick of a girl glowing in the forest depths, asking an old man to join her in her forest bower. He felt her anger, and her frustration and, yes, her sadness, for she was lonely, and she was scared, but she didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to visit her loneliness and fear on another, and Phineas didn’t know what would be worse: to die in the woods with the girl for company, until eventually the world faded to black; or to die and then wake up to find himself like her, wandering the woods looking for others to share his misery.
At last, Misty was freed. The dog shot away, then paused to make sure that her master was following her, for even in her relief to be free she would not abandon him in this place, just as he had not abandoned her. Slowly, Phineas went after her, his eyes fixed on the little girl, keeping her in sight for as long as he could, until she was visible no longer and he found himself once again on familiar ground.
And that was why Phineas Arbogast stopped going to his cabin in the Rangeley woods, where the ruins of it may still be visible somewhere between Rangeley and Langdon, bound with sticky briars as nature claims it as her own.