“And then,” she said, “we visited Tranquility.”
“When?”
“It was a weekend in fall. A little over a year ago. Most of the tourists were gone, and the weather was still nice. Indian summer. Noah and I rented a cottage on the lake. Every morning, when I woke up, I’d hear the loons. And nothing else. Just the loons, and silence. That’s what I loved most about that weekend, the feeling of complete peace. For once we didn’t argue. We actually enjoyed being together. That’s when I knew I wanted to leave Baltimore …” She shook her head. “I guess you had me pegged right, Lincoln. I’m like every other outsider who moves to this town, who’s running away from another life, another set of problems. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I only knew I couldn’t stay where I was.”
“And now?”
“I can’t stay here either,” she said brokenly.
“It’s too soon to make that decision, Claire. You haven’t been here long enough to build up the practice.”
“I’ve had nine months. All summer and fall, I sat in that office waiting for the flood of patients. Almost all I got were tourists. Summer people coming in for a sprained ankle or an upset stomach. When summer was over, they all went home. And I suddenly realized how few of my patients actually lived in this town. I thought I could hang on, that people would learn to trust me. It might’ve happened in another year or two. But after tonight, there’s no chance of it. I said what I had to say at that meeting and the town didn’t like it. Now my best option is to pack up and leave. And hope it’s not too late to go back to Baltimore.”
“You’re giving up so easily?”
It was a statement designed to provoke. Angry, she turned to look at him. “So easily? And when does it get hard?”
“It’s not the whole town attacking you. It’s a few disturbed individuals. You have more support than you realize.”
“Where is it? Why didn’t anyone else stand up for me at the meeting? You were the only one.”
“Some of them are confused. Or they’re afraid to speak up.”
“No wonder. They could get their tires slashed as well,” she said sarcastically
“It’s a very small town, Claire. People here think they know each other, but when you get right down to it, we really don’t. We keep our secrets to ourselves. We stake out our private territory and we don’t let others cross the line. Speaking up at a town meeting is opening ourselves to the public. Most choose to say nothing at all, even though they may agree with you.”
“All that silent support won’t help me earn a living.”
“No, it won’t.”
“There’s no guarantee any patients will walk into my office now.”
“It’d be a gamble, yes.”
“So why should I? Give me one reason why I should stay in this town?”
“Because I don’t want you to leave.”
This was not the answer she had expected. She stared at him, straining to read his expression in the gloom.
“This town needs someone like you,” he said. “Someone who comes in and stirs things up a little. Who makes us ask ourselves questions we’ve never had the nerve to ask. It would be a loss if you left us, Claire. It would be a loss to us all.”
“So you’re speaking on behalf of the town?”
“Yes.” He paused. And added softly, “And for myself as well.”
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“I’m not sure what it means, either. I don’t even know why I’m saying it. It doesn’t do either of us any good.” Abruptly he grasped the door handle and was about to open it when she reached out and touched his arm. At once he fell still, his hand clutching the door, his body poised to step into the cold.
“I used to think you didn’t like me,” she said.
He looked at her in surprise. “I gave you that impression?”
“It wasn’t anything you said.”
“What was it, then?”
“You never talked about anything personal. As if you didn’t want me to know things about you. It didn’t bother me. I realized that’s just how it is up here. People keep to themselves, the way you did. But after a while, after we’d known each other, and that invisible wall still seemed to stand between us, I thought: Maybe it’s not just the fact I’m an outsider. Maybe it’s me. Something he doesn’t like about me.”
“It is because of you, Claire.”
She paused. “I see.”
“I knew what would happen if I didn’t keep that wall up between us.” His shoulders sagged, as though under the weight of his unhappiness. “A person gets used to anything, even misery, if it goes on long enough. I’ve been married to Doreen so long, I guess I accepted it as the way things are supposed to be. I made a bad choice, I took on a responsibility, and I’ve done the best I could.”
“One mistake shouldn’t ruin your life.”
“When there’s someone else who’ll be hurt, it’s not easy to be selfish, to think only of yourself. It’s almost easier to do nothing and just let things slide. Add on another layer of numbness.”
A gust swept the windshield, leaving streaks of melting snow on the glass. Fresh snow swirled down, whitening over that fleeting glimpse of the night.
“If it seems I didn’t warm up to you, Claire,” he said, “it’s only because I was trying so hard not to.”
He reached, once again, to open the door.
Once again, she stopped him with a touch, her hand lingering on his arm.
He turned to face her. This time their gazes held, neither one flinching away, neither one retreating.
He cupped her face in his hand and kissed her. Before he could pull away, before he had time to regret the impulse, she leaned toward him, welcoming his kiss with one of her own.
His lips, the taste of his mouth, were new and unfamiliar to her. The kiss of a stranger. A man whose longing for her, so long concealed, now burned like a fever. She too had caught the sickness, felt the same heat flush her face, her whole body, as he pulled her against him. He said her name once, twice, a murmur of wonder that she was the one in his arms.
The glare of headlights suddenly penetrated the snow-covered windshield. They pulled apart and sat in guilty silence, listening to the sound of footsteps approaching the truck. Someone rapped on the passenger side. Snowflakes slithered in as Lincoln rolled down the window.
Officer Mark Dolan stared into the truck. His gaze took in both Lincoln and Claire, and all he said was, “Oh.” One syllable, an ocean’s worth of meaning.
“I, uh, I saw the doc’s engine running and wondered if everything was okay,” Dolan explained. “You know, carbon monoxide poisoning and all …”
“Everything’s fine,” said Lincoln.
“Yeah. All right.” Dolan backed away from the window. “’Night, Lincoln.”
“Good night.”
After Dolan had walked away, Claire and Lincoln sat without speaking for a moment. Then Lincoln said, “It’ll be all over town tomorrow.”
“I’m sure it will be. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” As he stepped out of her truck, he gave a reckless laugh. “Truth is, Claire, I don’t give a damn. Everything that’s gone wrong in my life has been public knowledge in this town. Now, for once, something’s gone right for me, and it might as well be public knowledge as well.”
She turned on the windshield wipers. Through the clearing glass she watched him wave good-night, then walk away to his car. Officer Dolan was still parked nearby, and Lincoln stopped to speak to him.
As she drove away, she suddenly remembered what Mitchell Groome had told her earlier that evening about Damaris Horne’s inside source.
Dark-haired, medium build. Works the night shift. Mark Dolan, she thought.
The next morning Lincoln drove south, to Orono. He had not slept well, had lain awake for hours mulling over the night’s events. The town meeting. His conversation with Iris Keating. The damage to Claire’s office. And Claire herself.
Mo
st of all, he’d thought about Claire.
At seven he’d awakened unrefreshed, and gone downstairs. It was a cold slap of reality to find Doreen still asleep on his living room couch. She lay with one arm dangling off the side, her red hair dull and greasy, her mouth half open. He stood for a moment, looking down at her, pondering how to convince her to leave with a minimum of yelling and crying on her part, but he was too weary to deal with the problem at that moment. Worrying about Doreen had already drained so much energy from his life. Just the sight of her seemed to drag down on his limbs, making them hang heavy, as though Doreen and the force of gravity were intimately connected.
“I’m sorry, Honey,” he said softly. “But I’m going on with my life.”
He made one phone call, then he left Doreen sleeping on the couch and walked out of the house. As he drove away, he felt the first layers of depression peel away like a worn outer skin. The roads were plowed, the pavement sanded; he pressed the accelerator, and as he picked up speed he felt he was shedding more and more layers, that if he just drove far enough, fast enough, the real Lincoln, the man he used to be, would finally emerge, scrubbed and clean and reborn. He sped past fields where the snow, so freshly fallen, puffed up in clouds of white powder with the slightest gust of wind. Keep driving, don’t stop, don’t look back. He had a destination in mind, and a purpose to this journey, but for now, what he experienced was the joyful rush of escape.
When he reached the University of Maine campus an hour later, he felt renewed and refreshed, as though he had enjoyed a long night’s sleep in a comfortable bed. He parked his car and walked onto the campus, and the cold air, the crystalline morning, invigorated him.
Lucy Overlock was in her office in the physical anthropology department. With her six-foot frame clad in her usual attire of blue jeans and flannel shirt, she looked more like a lumberjack than a college professor.
She greeted him with a calloused hand and a nononsense nod and sat down behind her desk. Even seated, she was an imposing woman of Amazonian proportions. “You said on the phone you had questions about the Locust Lake remains.”
“I want to know about the Gow family. How they died. Who killed them.”
She raised an eyebrow. “It’s about a hundred years too late to arrest anyone for that crime.”
“I’m bothered by the circumstances of their deaths. Did you ever locate any news articles about the murders?”
“Vince did—my grad student. He’s using the Gow case for his doctoral thesis. A reconstruction of an old murder, based on the remains. It took him weeks to track down an account. Not every old newspaper, you see, has been archived. Your particular area was so sparsely populated at that time, there wasn’t much news coverage.”
“So how did the Gow family die?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid it’s the same old story. Unfortunately, family violence is not a modern phenomenon.”
“The father did it?”
“No. It was their seventeen-year-old son. His body was found weeks later, hanging from a tree. Apparently a suicide.”
“What about motive? Was the boy disturbed?”
Lucy leaned back, her tanned face catching the light from the window. Years of work in the outdoors had taken their toll on her complexion, and the wintry light illuminated every freckle, every deepening crease. “We don’t know. The family apparently lived in relative isolation. According to the deed maps for that period, the Gows’ property encompassed the whole south shore of the lake. There may not have been any neighbors around who’d know the boy very well.”
“Then the family was wealthy?”
“I wouldn’t say wealthy, but they’d be considered land rich. Vince said the property came into the Gow family in the late 1700s, and stayed with them until this … event. It was later sold off piece by piece. Developed.”
“Is Vince that scruffy kid with the ponytail?”
She laughed. “All my students are scruffy. It’s almost a prerequisite for graduation.”
“And where can I find Vince right now?”
“At nine o’clock, he should be in his office. The museum basement. I’ll call and let him know you’re coming.”
Lincoln had been here before. The broad wooden table was covered with pottery shards this time, not human remains, and the basement windows were blotted over by drifted snow. The lack of natural light, and the damp stone steps, made Lincoln feel he had descended into some vast underground cavern. He walked into the maze of storage shelves, past towering stacks of artifact boxes, their labels feathered by mold. “Human mandible (male)” was all he could make out on one label. A wooden box, he thought, is a sadly anonymous resting place for what had once been a man’s jaw. He moved deeper into the maze, his throat already scratchy from the dust and mildew and a faintly smoky odor that grew stronger as he progressed through the shadows, toward the far end of the basement. Marijuana.
“Mr. Brentano?” he called out.
“I’m back here, Chief Kelly,” a voice answered. “Take a left at the stuffed owl.”
Lincoln walked a few more paces and came to a great horned owl mounted in a glass case. He turned left.
Vince Brentano’s “office” was little more than a desk and a filing cabinet crammed in between artifact shelves. Though there was no ashtray in sight, the aroma of pot hung heavy in the air, and the young man, clearly uneasy in the presence of a cop, had assumed a defensive posture, barricaded behind his desk, arms braced in front of him. Looking the boy straight in the eye, Lincoln held out his hand in greeting.
After a hesitation, Vince shook it. They both understood the meaning of that gesture: a treaty between them was now in force.
“Sit down,” offered Vince. “You can set that box on the floor, but watch the chair—it wobbles a little. Everything in here wobbles. As you can see, I got the deluxe office.”
Lincoln removed the box from the chair and set it down. The contents gave an ominous clatter.
“Bones,” said Vince.
“Human?”
“Lowland gorilla. I use them for comparison teaching. I hand them to the undergrads and ask them for a diagnosis, but I don’t tell them the bones aren’t human. You should hear some of the crazy answers I get. Everything from acromegaly to syphilis.”
“That’s a trick question.”
“Hey, all of life is a trick question.” Vince sat back, thoughtfully regarding Lincoln. “I take it this visit is a trick question, too. The police don’t usually waste their time on century-old murders.”
“The Gow family interests me for other reasons.”
“Which are?”
“I believe their deaths may be related to our current problems in Tranquility.”
Vince looked puzzled. “Are you referring to the recent murders?”
“They were committed by otherwise normal kids. Teenagers who lost control and killed. We’ve got child psychologists psychoanalyzing every kid in town, but they can’t explain it. So I got to thinking about what happened to the Gows. The parallels.”
“You mean the part about teenage killers?” Vince shrugged. “The underdog will only take so much abuse. When authority clamps down too hard, young people rebel. It’s happened again and again.”
“This isn’t rebellion. It’s kids going berserk, killing friends and family.” He paused. “The same thing happened fifty-two years ago.”
“What did?”
“Nineteen forty-six, in Tranquility. Seven murders committed during the month of November.”
“Seven?” Vince’s eyes widened behind the wire-rim glasses. “In a town of how many people?”
“In 1946, there were seven hundred living in Tranquility. Now we’re facing the same crisis, all over again.”
Vince gave a startled laugh. “Man, you’ve obviously got some major sociological issues in your town, Chief. But don’t blame it on the kids. Look to the adults. When children grow up with violence, they learn that violence is how they solve problems. Dad worships
the almighty gun, goes out and blasts a deer to smithereens for sport. Junior gets the message: Killing is fun.”
“That’s too pat an explanation.”
“Our society glorifies violence! And then we put guns in the hands of children. Ask any sociologist.”
“I don’t think the sociologists can explain this.”
“Okay. What’s your explanation, Chief Kelly?”
“Rainfall.”
There was a long silence. “Excuse me?”
“In 1946, and again this year, we’ve had identical weather patterns. It started off in April, with heavy rains. The local bridge was washed out, livestock were drowned—”
Vince rolled his eyes heavenward. “A flood of Biblical proportions?”
“Look, I’m not a religious man—”
“I’m not a believer, either, Chief Kelly. I’m a scientist.”
“Then you’re always looking for patterns in nature, right? Correlations. Well, here’s the pattern I’m seeing, both this year and in 1946. In April and May, our town has record rainfall. The Locust River floods, and there’s major damage to homes along the riverbank. Then the rains stop, and in July and August, there’s no rain at all. In fact, it’s unusually hot, with temperatures high enough to make it into the record books, both those years.” He took a breath, slowly released it. “Finally, in November,” he said, “it starts to happen.”
“What does?”
“The killing.”
Vince said nothing, his expression shuttered.
“I know it sounds crazy,” said Lincoln.
“You have no idea how crazy it sounds.”
“But the correlation’s there. Dr. Elliot thinks it could be a natural phenomenon. A new bacteria or algae in the lake, causing personality changes. I read about a similar thing happening, in rivers down south. A microorganism’s killing fish by the millions. It makes a toxin that affects humans as well. It damages their concentration, sometimes causes rage attacks.”