48
Ronald Straydeer sat in the living room of his home near the Scarborough Downs racetrack. He held in his hands a photograph of himself as a younger man in uniform, his left arm encircling the neck of a massive German Shepherd dog. Ronald was smiling in the picture, and he liked to think that Elsa was smiling, too.
He wished that he still smoked pot. He wished that he still drank. It would have been easy to return to doing one or the other, or even both. Under the circumstances, it would not have been surprising or blameworthy. Instead he spoke to the picture, and to the ghost of the dog within it.
He was often asked, by those who did not know any better, why he had not found himself another dog in the intervening years. He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals’ relatively short lives. The trick – if trick was the right word – was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to dog, with each one representing the same life force. Ronald believed that there might be some sense in this, but he felt, too, that men might equally say the same thing about women, and vice versa. He had known plenty of women, and had even loved one or two of them, so he had some experience in the matter. But some men and women lost a partner early in life and never managed to give themselves again to another, and Ronald thought there might have been something of that catastrophic sense of loss to his feelings for his lost dog. He was not a sentimental man – although, again, some mistook his grieving for a dead animal as sentimentality. Ronald Straydeer had simply loved the dog, and Elsa had saved his life and the lives of his brother soldiers on more than one occasion. In the end he was forced to abandon and betray her, and the sight of her, caged and scratching at the wire as she was taken from him, had torn at him every day since then. His only hope was that he might eventually be reunited with his dog in a world beyond this one.
Now he told the ghost of the dog about the church and the girl and the shadows that had encircled her before she was dragged beneath the ground. He could have gone to the police, but there was a policeman involved. And what could he have told them: that he saw a girl kneel by a hole in the earth and then disappear? All he had was a fragment of pale material. Could they extract DNA from it? Ronald did not know. It depended, he supposed, on whether it had touched the girl’s skin for long enough, if it had touched her at all. He had placed the material in one of the resealable bags that he used for food and waste. It was before him now. He held it up to the light, but he could see no traces of blood on it, and it seemed to him to be stained only by dirt. He did not know her name, and he was not sure if he could have identified her from the glimpse that he caught of her in the greenish light of his night vision lens. He knew only that she was not Jude’s daughter. He had seen photographs of Annie. Jude had shared them with him, and Ronald retained an uncanny recall for faces and names. The girl swallowed by the churchyard was younger than Jude’s daughter. Ronald wondered if Annie, too, lay somewhere in that cemetery, if her fate had been the same as that poor girl’s. If so, how many others slept beneath the church, embraced by roots? (For they were not shadows that had wrapped themselves around the girl as she was taken, oh no …)
But Ronald also understood instinctively that, even if people were to believe him and a search was eventually conducted, men could dig long and deep in that churchyard without finding any trace of the girl. As he worked at the collapsed earth with his bare hands, hoping to reveal some sign of her, he had felt the presence of a perfect and profound hostility, a malevolent hunger given form. It was this, more than any inability to keep digging, that had caused him to abandon his efforts to find a body. Even now, he was glad that he had used the water in the Fulcis’ truck to clean his hands of the soil from that place, and one of their towels to dry them, and had then disposed of the towel in a Dumpster so that it would not be used again. He was grateful not to have contaminated his home with even a fragment of that cursed earth, and he kept sealed the bag containing the piece of material lest some minute particle of grit should fall from it and pollute all.
The detective would have known what to do, but he was dying. He had friends, though: clever men, dangerous men. Right now, those men would be looking for the ones responsible for shooting him. Ronald didn’t find it hard to make a connection between the detective’s inquiries into the disappearance of Annie Broyer and the sight of an unknown girl being dragged beneath the ground while a group of men and women stood by and watched. It wasn’t much of a stretch from there to imagine a set of circumstances in which those same people might have seen ft to try and take the detective’s life.
And if he was wrong? Well, the men who stood by the detective were more like him than perhaps even they knew, and they had wrath to spare. Ronald would find a way to contact them, and together they would avenge those trapped in uneasy rest beneath the dirt of Prosperous.
As Ronald Straydeer sat in contemplation and mourning, the bodies of Magnus and Dianne Madsen, and Erin Dixon, were discovered by police after Magnus failed to appear as scheduled for his hospital duties. The Maine State Police informed Lucas Morland of the Prosperous Police Department once Erin’s identity was established. With both Kayley Madsen and Harry Dixon apparently missing, a patrol car was immediately dispatched to the Dixon house, but there was no sign of Harry or his niece. Their faces duly began showing up on news channels, and an auto dealer in Medway came forward to say that he’d taken a trade-in on a GMC Passenger van with Harry Dixon just a few days earlier. The van was soon found in a patch of woodland just outside of Bangor, with Harry seated at the wheel and a hole in the back of his head where the bullet from the gun in his hand had exited. On the seat beside him was a woman’s shirt, stained with blood at the collar. Its size matched clothing found in Kayley Madsen’s closet, and DNA tests would subsequently confirm that the blood was Kayley’s, although no other trace of her was ever found.
‘PROSPEROUS: MAINE’S CURSED TOWN‘ read one of the more lurid newspaper headlines in the aftermath. Prosperous crawled with MSP investigators, but Morland handled them all well. He was diligent, cooperative and unassuming. He knew his place. Only once did he experience a shred of alarm, and that was when an FBI agent named Ross visited from New York. Ross sat in Morland’s office, nibbled on a cookie, and asked about the detective, Parker. Why had he come to Prosperous? What did he want to know? And then he gave Morland a possible ‘out’: had Parker spoken to Harry Dixon or his wife at any point? Morland didn’t know, but he conceded that it might have been possible, although why Parker might have wanted to meet with the Dixons Morland couldn’t say. But anything that linked Parker to the Dixons was good for Morland, and good for Prosperous. That was a dead end, and the FBI and State Police could spend decades peering into it for all Morland cared.
‘Can I ask why the FBI is interested in the shooting of a private detective in Maine?’ said Morland.
‘Curiosity,’ said Ross. Then: ‘Your town seems to be having a bad time of it lately.’
‘Yeah,’ said Morland. ‘They say these things come in threes.’
‘Really?’ said Ross. ‘I count, uh—’ He worked it out on his fingers. ‘Six,’ he concluded. ‘Or nine, if you include the Madsens and their missing daughter. Or, wow, eleven allowing for that homeless guy in Portland, and his missing daughter. That’s a lot. More than three, anyway.’
It wasn’t the first time Morland had heard something of the kind. The MSP investigators had intimated as much, and now Morland replied to Ross just as he had responded to them.
‘Sir, my reckoning is two killings by religious terrorists thousands of miles from here; one accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound on an elderly man; one automobile incident; and, to our shame and regret, an apparent murder-suicide involving two of our townsfolk. I can’t speak to suicides in Portland, or missing girls. I just know what this town has endured. I can’t say why Harry Dixon might have killed those people. I heard that he had money problems, but a lot of folk have money problems and don’t take a gun to their family as a consequence. It could be that the town’s troubles caused something in him to snap. I’m no psychiatrist. But if you can establish a connection between all those disparate events, then I’ll never again question the amount of taxes our government ploughs into the Bureau.’
Ross finished his cookie.
‘And the attempted murder of a private investigator,’ said Ross. ‘I almost forgot to add that.’
Morland didn’t respond. He was all done with the FBI for now.
‘Can I help you with anything else today, Agent Ross?’
‘No,’ said Ross. ‘I think that’ll be all. I appreciate your time. And the cookie was very good. My compliments to the baker.’
‘My wife,’ said Morland.
‘You’re a fortunate man,’ said Ross.
He stood and buttoned his coat before heading out. There was still a chill in the air.
‘And this is quite a town. Quite a town indeed.’
Thirty minutes later, Morland received a call from Pastor Warraner.
Ross had been out at the church.