She shrank back from him. Harry rarely ever raised his voice – not in joy, and certainly not in anger. That was one of the reasons she had been so attracted to him. Harry was like a strong tree: he could be buffeted by storms, but he always remained rooted. The downside of his disposition was that tendency not to act but to react, and then only when no other option presented itself. Now he found himself in a situation that he had always hoped to avoid, and since he did not know how to extricate himself from it he had responded with inertia, combined with a peculiar misplaced faith in a combination of good luck and the possibility of a change of mind on the part of the board.
‘I’m dealing with it,’ said Harry.
His voice had returned to its usual volume. That brief flash of anger, of energy, was gone, and Erin regretted its passing. Anything was better than this lassitude.
Before she could continue, there was a knock on their door. They had heard no car approaching, and had seen no lights.
Harry got up. He tried not to think of who might be out there: Morland, asking to look at their basement again, querying further the manner of the girl’s escape; or Hayley Conyer, come to check on their progress, to see if they’d started trawling the streets yet.
But it was neither of them. On the doorstep stood Luke Joblin’s son, Bryan. He had a bag at his feet. Bryan was twenty-six or twenty-seven, if Harry remembered correctly. He did some lifting work for his father, and was good with his hands. Harry had seen some furniture that Bryan had made, and was impressed by it. The boy had no real discipline, though. He didn’t work at developing his gifts. He didn’t want to be a joiner, or a carpenter or a furniture maker. Mostly he just liked hunting, in season and out: anything from a crow to a moose, Bryan Joblin was happy to try and kill it.
‘Bryan?’ said Harry. ‘What are you doing out here?’
‘My dad heard that you might need some help,’ said Bryan, and Harry didn’t like the gleam in his eye. He didn’t like it one little bit. ‘He suggested I ought to stay with you for a week or two. You know, just until you get back on top of things again.’
It was only then that Harry saw the rife case. A Remington 700 in .30–06. He’d seen Bryan with it often enough.
Harry didn’t move. He felt Erin’s presence behind him, and it was only when she put her hand on his shoulder that he realized he was trembling.
‘There’s no problem, is there, Mr Dixon?’ said Bryan, and his tone made it clear that there was only one right answer to the question.
‘No, there’s no problem at all,’ said Harry.
He stepped back to admit Bryan. The boy picked up his bag and gun and stepped inside. He greeted Erin with a nod – ‘Mrs Dixon’ – and the food on the table caught his attention.
‘Pot roast,’ he said. ‘Smells good.’
Erin had not taken her eyes off Harry. Now they looked at each other across the Joblin boy, and they knew.
‘I’ll show you to your room, Bryan,’ said Erin, ‘and then you can join us for a bite to eat. There’s plenty to go around.’
Harry watched her lead him down the hall to the spare room. When they were both out of sight, Harry put his face in his hands and leaned back against the wall. He was still standing in that position when Erin returned. She kissed his neck and buried herself in the scent of him.
‘You were right,’ he whispered. ‘They’re turning on us.’
‘What will we do?’
He answered without hesitation.
‘We’ll run.’
21
The wolf was in agony. The injury to his limb was worsening. In his earlier pain and fear, he had traveled far from the place of his pack’s destruction, but now he was having trouble walking even a short distance. Somewhere in the depths of his consciousness, the wolf recognized the fact of his own dying. It manifested as a gradual encroachment of darkness upon light, a persistent dimming at the edges of his vision.
The wolf feared men, dreading the sound and scent of them, remembering still the carnage they had wrought by the banks of the river. But where men gathered, so too was there food. The wolf was reduced to scavenging among trash cans and garbage bags, but in doing so he was eating better than he had in weeks. He had even managed to take a small mongrel dog that had ventured too far into the woods. The wolf could hear the noise of men calling and whistling as he tore the dog’s throat apart, but the prey’s body was light enough to clamp in his jaws and carry away. He took it far from the sounds of pursuit, and consumed it until just fur and bone remained.
But the wolf remained hungry.
Now it was night, and his nose was twitching. He smelled decaying meat. He came to the place where the scent was strongest, and found that the ground was soft and broken.
Ignoring the ache in his wounded leg, he started to dig.
II
TRAPPING
‘We! Lord,’ quoth the gentyle knight,
‘Whether this be the Grene Chapel?
Here myght about midnight
The Devel his matynes telle.’
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
22
Prosperous looked like a lot of Maine towns, except that those towns lay mostly Down East and were kept wealthy by tourists who didn’t balk at spending fifty dollars on decorative lobster buoys. But Prosperous was well off the tourist trail, and its stores and businesses relied on local trade to remain solvent. Driving down Main Street I took in the antique streetlamps and the carefully maintained storefronts and the absence of anything resembling a chain store. Both coffee shops were small and local, and the pharmacy looked old enough to be able to fill out prescriptions for leeches. The Prosperous Tap reminded me of Jacob Wirth’s in Boston, even down to the old clock hanging above the sign, and the general store at the edge of town could have been dropped into the nineteenth century without attracting even a single sidelong glance.
That morning I had done a little reading up on Prosperous in the library of the Maine Historical Society in Portland before making the journey northwest. Prosperous’s home ownership rate was as close to 100 percent as made no difference, and the median value of property inside the town limits was at least 50 percent higher than the state average. So too was median household income, and the number of residents who held a bachelor’s degree or higher. Meanwhile, if Prosperous had any black residents they were keeping themselves well hidden, and it was the same for Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans. In fact, if the census figures were correct, Prosperous had no foreign-born residents at all. Curiously, the number of residents per household was much higher than the state average as well: nearly four, while the average was 2.34. It seemed that kids in Prosperous liked to stay home with mom and dad.
There was one other strange fact that I discovered about Prosperous. Although its percentage of military veterans was roughly proportional to its size, none of the townsfolk had ever been fatally wounded while serving their country. Not one. All had returned home safely. This extraordinary feat had been the subject of an article in the Maine Sunday Telegram following the return of Prosperous’s last serving soldier from Vietnam in 1975. The town’s good fortune was ascribed to the ‘power of prayer’ by its pastor, a Reverend Watkyn Warraner. His son, Michael Warraner, was the town’s current pastor. While there were various Catholic, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian houses of worship in the surrounding towns, the only church within the town limits was the tiny, and peculiarly named, Congregation of Adam Before Eve & Eve Before Adam, and it was of this flock that Michael Warraner was apparently shepherd.
Which was where things got really interesting: Prosperous’s church, which was stone built and barely large enough to hold more than twenty people, had been transported to Maine in its entirety from the county of Northumbria in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Each stone of the church was carefully marked and its position in the structure recorded, then all were carried as ballast on the ships that brought the original congregation to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1703. From there, these pilgrims journeyed north to Maine and, over a period of decades, eventually founded the town of Prosperous and rebuilt their church, which had been placed in storage for the duration.
The reason why they left Northumbria, and took their church building with them, came down to religious persecution. The Congregation, as it became known, was an offshoot of the Family of Love, or the Familists, a religious sect that emerged in sixteenth-century Europe. The Family of Love was secretive, and reputedly hostile to outsiders to the point of homicide, although that may just have been anti-Familist propaganda. Marriage and remarriage was kept within the sect, as was the precise nature of its followers’ beliefs. As far as I could make out, the Familists believed that hell and heaven existed on earth, and there was a time preceding Adam and Eve. In the seventeenth century, the majority of Familists became part of the Quaker movement, with the exception of a small group of Northumbrian members who rejected a formal rapport with the Quakers or anyone else, and continued to worship in their own way, despite efforts by King Charles II to crack down on nonconformist churches in England. All officials in towns were required to be members of the Church of England, all clergy had to use the Book of Common Prayer, and unauthorized religious gatherings of more than five people were forbidden unless all were members of the same family. The Familists were among those persecuted in this way.
But it seemed that the sect proved hard to suppress. The Familists learned to hide themselves by joining established churches while continuing to conduct their own services in secret, and they maintained that charade during the worst years of the crackdown on nonconformism. Also, as intermarriage between families was common, they could easily circumvent the rule about religious gatherings.
In 1689, the parliament in London passed the Toleration Act, which gave nonconformists the right to their own teachers, preachers and places of worship, but it seemed that some Familists had already made the decision to abandon the shores of England entirely. It may have been that they had simply grown weary of hiding, and had lost faith in their own government. The only hint of a deeper discontent lay in the footnotes of an essay I found entitled ‘The Flight West: NonConformist Churches and the Goodness of God in Early New England Settlements’, in which it was suggested that the Familists who formed the Congregation had been forced out of England because they were so nonconformist as to be almost pagan.
This corresponded to a couple of paragraphs in Jude’s book on church architecture, which stated that the Congregation’s church was notable for its carved figurines, including numerous ‘foliate heads’, part of a tradition of carving ancient fertility symbols and nature spirits on Christian buildings. Such decorations were routinely tolerated, even embraced, on older houses of worship. They were a kind of tacit recognition by the early church fathers of the link between the people and the land in agrarian communities. In the case of the building that eventually found its way to Maine, though, the general consensus among the sect’s opponents was that the heads were more than merely decorative: they were the object of Familist worship, and it was the Christian symbols that were merely incidental. As I parked just off Main Street, it struck me as odd that a congregation with a history of concealment should have placed enough value on an old church building to transport it across the Atlantic Ocean. This might be a church worth seeing.
The interior of the town office, housed in a brownstone nineteenth-century building with a modern extension to the rear, was bright and clean. When I asked to see the chief of police, I was directed to a comfortable chair and offered coffee while a call was put through to his office. The coffee came with a cookie on a napkin. If I stayed long enough, someone would probably have offered me a pillow and a blanket. Instead, I passed the minutes looking at the images of Prosperous through the years that decorated the walls. It hadn’t changed much over the centuries. The names on the storefronts remained mostly the same, and only the cars on the streets, and the fashions of the men and women in the photographs, gave any clues to the passage of time.
A door opened to my right, and a man in uniform appeared. He was taller than me and broader in the back and shoulders, and his neatly pressed dark blue shirt was open at the neck to reveal a startlingly white T-shirt beneath. His hair was dark brown. He wore rimless bifocal spectacles, and a SIG as a sidearm. All things considered, he looked like an accountant who worked out most evenings. Only his eyes spoiled the effect. They were a pale gray, the color of a winter sky presaging snow.
‘Lucas Morland,’ he said, as he shook my hand. ‘I’m chief of police here.’
‘Charlie Parker.’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr Parker,’ he said, and he appeared to mean it. ‘I’ve read a lot about you. I see you’ve already been given coffee. You need a top off?’
I told him I was fine with what I had, and he invited me to step into his office. It was hard to tell what color the walls might be as they were covered with enough certifcates and awards to render paint pretty much redundant. On his desk were various photographs of a dark-haired woman and two dark-haired boys. Chief Morland wasn’t in any of them. I wondered if he was separated. Then again, he may just have been the one taking the photographs. I was in danger of becoming a ‘glass half-empty’ kind of guy. Or a ‘glass emptier’ guy.
Or maybe a ‘What glass?’ guy.
‘You have a nice town,’ I said.
‘It’s not mine. I just look out for it. We all do, in our way. You considering moving here?’
‘I don’t think I could afford the taxes.’
‘Try doing it on a cop’s salary.’
‘That’s probably how communism started. You’d better keep your voice down or they’ll start looking for another chief.’
He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. I noticed that he had a small belly. That was the problem with quiet towns: there wasn’t much that one could do in them to burn calories.
‘Oh, we have all kinds here,’ said Morland. ‘Did you notice the motto on the sign as you came into town?’
‘I can’t say that I did.’
‘It’s easy to miss, I guess. It’s just one word: Tolerance.’
‘Pithy.’
He looked out the window and watched a stream of elementary school kids waddle by, each with one hand clinging tightly to a pink rope. It was a clear day, but cold, and they were wrapped in so many layers that it was impossible to see their faces. Once the kids had disappeared from view, and he was content that nothing had befallen them, or was likely to, he returned his attention to me.
‘So how can I help you, Mr Parker?’
I handed him a copy of a photograph of Jude that I’d found at the Portland Help Center. It had been taken at a Christmas lunch the previous year, and Jude was smiling in a tan suit and white shirt accessorized by a piece of tinsel in place of a tie. A pedant would have pointed out that the suit was too close to cream for the time of year, but Jude wouldn’t have cared.
‘I was wondering if you’d seen this man around Prosperous recently, or if he’d had any contact with your department,’ I said.