The first wife, and the first daughter.
I ordered coffee for Rebecca Clay. A beam of morning sunlight shone mercilessly upon her, exposing the lines in her face, the gray seeping into her hair despite the color job, the dark patches beneath her eyes. Some of that was probably down to the man she claimed was bothering her, but it was clear that much of it had deeper origins. The troubles of her life had aged her prematurely. From the way her makeup had been applied, hurriedly and heavily, it was possible to guess that here was a woman who didn’t like looking in the mirror for too long, and who didn’t like what she saw staring back at her when she did.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been here before,” she said. “Portland has changed so much these last few years, it’s a wonder that this place has survived.”
She was right, I supposed. The city was changing, but older, quirkier remnants of its past somehow contrived to remain: used bookstores, and barbershops, and bars where the menu never changed because the food had always been good, right from the start. That was why the Porthole had survived. Those who knew about it valued it, and made sure to pass a little business its way whenever they could.
Her coffee arrived. She added sugar, then stirred it for too long.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Clay?”
She stopped stirring, content to begin speaking now that the conversation had been started for her.
“It’s like I told you on the phone. A man has been bothering me.”
“Bothering you how?”
“He hangs around outside my house. I live out by Willard Beach. I’ve seen him in Freeport too, or when I’ve been shopping at the mall.”
“Was he in a car, or on foot?”
“On foot.”
“Has he entered your property?”
“No.”
“Has he threatened you, or physically assaulted you in any way?”
“No.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Just over a week.”
“Has he spoken to you?”
“Only once, two days ago.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me that he was looking for my father. My daughter and I live in my father’s old house now. He said he had some business with him.”
“How did you respond to that?”
“I told him that I hadn’t seen my father in years. I told him that as far as I was aware, my father was dead. In fact, since earlier this year he’s been legally dead. I went through all of the paperwork. I didn’t want to, but I suppose it was important to me, and to my daughter, that we finally achieved some kind of closure.”
“Tell me about your father.”
“He was a child psychiatrist, a good one. He worked with adults too, sometimes, but they had usually suffered some kind of trauma in childhood and felt that he could help them with it. Then things started to change for him. There was a difficult case: a man was accused of abuse by his son in the course of a custody dispute. My father felt that the allegations had substance, and his findings led to custody being granted to the mother, but the son subsequently retracted his accusations and said that his mother had convinced him to say those things. By then it was too late for the father. Word had leaked out about the allegations, probably from the mother. He lost his job, and got beaten up pretty badly by some men in a bar. He ended up shooting himself dead in his bedroom. My father took it badly, and there were complaints filed about his conduct of the original interviews with the boy. The Board of Licensure dismissed them, but after that my father wasn’t asked to conduct any further evaluations in abuse cases. It shook his confidence, I think.”
“When was this?”
“About 1998, maybe a little before. It got worse after that.” She shook her head in apparent disbelief at the memory. “Even talking about it, I realize how crazy it all sounds. It was just a mess.” She looked around to reassure herself that nobody was listening, then lowered her voice a little. “It emerged that some of my father’s patients were sexually abused by a group of men, and there were questions asked again about my father’s methods and his reliability. My father blamed himself for what happened. Other people did too. The Board of Licensure summoned him to appear for an initial informal meeting to discuss what had happened, but he never made it. He drove out to the edge of the North Woods, abandoned his car, and that was the last anyone ever saw or heard of him. The police looked for him, but they never found any trace. That was in late September 1999.”
Clay. Rebecca Clay.
“You’re Daniel Clay’s daughter?”
She nodded. Something flashed across her face. It was an involuntary spasm, a kind of wince. I knew a little about Daniel Clay. Portland is a small place, a city in name only. Stories like Daniel Clay’s tended to linger in the collective memory. I didn’t know too many of the details, but like everyone else I’d heard the rumors. Rebecca Clay had summarized the circumstances of her father’s disappearance in the most general terms, and I didn’t blame her for leaving out the rest: the whispers that Dr. Daniel Clay might have known about what was happening to some of the children with whom he was dealing, the possibility that he might have colluded in it, might even have engaged in abuse himself. There had been an investigation of sorts, but there were records missing from his office, and the confidential nature of his vocation made it difficult to follow up leads. There was also the absence of any solid evidence against him. But that didn’t stop people from talking and drawing their own conclusions.
I looked closer at Rebecca Clay. Her father’s identity made her appearance a little easier to understand. I imagined that she kept herself to herself. There would be friends, but not many. Daniel Clay had cast a shadow upon his daughter’s life, and she had wilted under its influence.
“So you told this man, the one who’s been stalking you, that you hadn’t seen your father for a long time. How did he react?”
“He tapped the side of his nose and winked.” She replicated the gesture for me. “Then he said, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’ He told me that he’d give me some time to think about what I was saying. After that, he just walked away.”
“Why would he call you a liar? Did he give any indication that he might know something more about your father’s disappearance?”
“No, nothing at all.”
“And the police haven’t been able to trace him?”
“He melts away. I think they believe I’m making up stories to get attention, but I’m not. I wouldn’t do that. I—”
I waited.
“You know about my father. There are those who believe that he did something wrong. I think the police are among them, and sometimes I wonder if they think I know more than I do about what happened, and that I’ve been protecting my father for all this time. When they came to the house, I knew what was on their minds: that I did know where he was, and somehow I’ve been in contact with him over the years.”
“And have you?”
She blinked hard, but she held my gaze.
“No.”
“But now it seems like the police aren’t the only ones who doubt your story. What does this man look like?”
“He’s in his sixties, I think. His hair is black. It looks dyed, and it’s in kind of a quiff, the way those ’fifties rock stars used to wear their hair. He has brown eyes, and there’s scarring here.” She pointed to her forehead, just below her hairline. “There are three parallel marks, like someone dug a fork into his skin and dragged it down. He’s short, maybe five-five or so, but stocky. His arms are real big, and there are folds of muscle at the back of his neck. He mostly wears the same clothes: blue jeans and a T-shirt, sometimes with a black suit jacket, other times with an old black leather jacket. He has a paunch, but he’s not fat, not really. His nails are very short, and he keeps himself real clean, except—”
She stopped. I didn’t disturb her as she tried to figure out the best way of formulating what she wanted to say.
“He wears some
kind of cologne. It’s wicked strong, but when he was speaking to me, it was like I caught a hint of whatever it was masking. It was a bad smell, a sort of animal stench. It made me want to run away from him.”
“Did he tell you his name?”
“No. He just said that he had business with my father. I kept telling him my father was dead, but he shook his head and smiled at me. He said he wouldn’t believe any man was dead until he could smell the body.”
“Have you any idea why this man should have turned up now, so many years after your father’s disappearance?”
“He didn’t say. It could be that he heard news of the legal declaration of my father’s death.”
For probate purposes, under Maine law, a person was presumed dead after a continuous absence of five years during which time he had not been heard from and his absence had not been satisfactorily explained. In some cases, the court could order a “reasonably diligent” search, the notification of law enforcement and public welfare officials about the details of the case, and require that a request for information be posted in the newspapers. According to Rebecca Clay, she had complied with all of the conditions that the court had set, but no further information about her father had emerged as a result.
“There was also a piece about my father in an art magazine earlier this year, after I sold a couple of his paintings. I needed the money. My father was a pretty talented artist. He spent a lot of time in the woods, painting and sketching. His work doesn’t go for much by modern standards—the most I ever got for one was a thousand dollars—but I’ve been able to sell some from time to time when money was scarce. My father didn’t exhibit, and he only produced a relatively small body of work. He sold by word of mouth, and his paintings were always sought after by those collectors familiar with him. By the end of his life he was receiving offers to buy work that didn’t even exist yet.”
“What kind of paintings are we talking about?”
“Landscapes, mostly. I can probably show you some photographs, if you’re interested. I’ve sold them all now, apart from one.”
I knew some people in Portland’s art scene. I thought I might ask them about Daniel Clay. In the meantime, there was the matter of the man who was bothering his daughter.
“I’m not just concerned for my own sake,” she said. “My daughter, Jenna, she’s just eleven. I’m afraid to let her out of the house alone now. I’ve tried to explain a little of what’s been happening to her, but I don’t want to frighten her too much either.”
“What do you want me to do about this man?” I said. It seemed like a strange question to ask, I knew, but it was necessary. Rebecca Clay had to understand what she was getting herself into.
“I want you to talk to him. I want you to make him go away.”
“That’s two different things.”
“What?”
“Talking to him and making him go away.”
She looked puzzled. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she said. “I’m not following you.”
“We need to be straight on some things before we begin. I can approach him on your behalf, and we can try to clear all of this up without trouble. It could be that he’ll see reason and go about his business, but from what you’ve told me it sounds like he’s got some notions fixed in his head, which means that he might not go without a fight. If that’s the case, either we can try to get the cops to take him in, and look for a court order preventing him from approaching you, which can be hard to get and even harder to enforce, or we can find some other way to convince him that he should leave you alone.”
“You mean threaten him, or hurt him?”
She seemed to quite like the idea. I didn’t blame her. I had met people who had endured years of harassment from individuals, and had seen them worn down by tension and distress. Some of them had resorted to violence in the end, but it usually just led to an escalation of the problem. One couple I knew had even ended up being sued by the wife’s stalker after the husband threw a punch in frustration, further entangling their lives with his.
“They’re options,” I said, “but they leave us open to charges of assault, or threatening behavior. Worse, if the situation is not handled carefully, then this whole affair could get much worse. Right now, he hasn’t done more than make you uneasy, which is bad enough. If we strike at him, he may decide to strike back. It could put you in real danger.”
She almost slumped with frustration.
“So what can I do?”
“Look,” I said, “I’m not trying to make out that there’s no hope of resolving this painlessly. I just want you to understand that if he decides to stick around, then there are no quick fixes.”
She perked up slightly. “So you’ll take the job?”
I told her my rates. I informed her that, as a one-man agency, I wouldn’t take on other jobs that might conflict with my work on her behalf. If it became necessary to call on outside help, I would advise her of any additional costs that might arise. At any point, she could call a halt to our arrangement, and I would try to help her find some other way of handling her problem before I left the job. She seemed content with that. I took payment up front for the first week. I didn’t exactly need the money for myself—my lifestyle was pretty simple—but I made a point of sending some money to Rachel every month, even though she said it wasn’t necessary.
I agreed to start the following day. I would stay close to Rebecca Clay when she headed out to work in the mornings. She would inform me when she was leaving her office for lunch, for meetings, or to go home in the evening. Her house was fitted with an alarm, but I arranged to have someone check it out and to fit extra bolts and chains if necessary. I would be outside before she left in the morning, and I would remain within sight of the house until she went to bed. At any time she could contact me, and I would be with her within twenty minutes.
I asked her if, by any chance, she might have a photograph of her father that she could give me. She had anticipated the request, although she appeared slightly reluctant to hand it over after she had taken it from her bag. It showed a thin, gangly man wearing a green tweed suit. His hair was snow white, his eyebrows bushy. He wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, and he had a stern, old-fashioned air of academia about him. He looked like a man who belonged amid clay pipes and leather-bound volumes.
“I’ll have some copies made and get it back to you,” I said.
“I have others,” she replied. “Hold on to it for as long as you need to.”
She asked me if I would keep an eye on her while she was in town that day. She worked in real estate and had some business to attend to for a couple of hours. She was worried that the man might approach her while she was in the city. She offered to pay me extra, but I declined. I had nothing better to do anyway.
So I followed her for the rest of the day. Nothing happened, and there was no sign of the man with the dated quiff and the scars upon his face. It was tedious and tiring, but at least it meant that I did not have to return to my house, my not-quite-empty house. I shadowed her so that my own ghosts could not shadow me.
2
The revenger walked along the boardwalk at Old Orchard, close to where the Guesser’s concession had stood for summer upon summer. The old man was gone now, and the revenger supposed that he was probably dead; dead, or no longer capable of performing the feats that he once had, his eyes unable to see as clearly, his hearing muffled and decayed, his memory too fragmentary to record and order the information being fed to it. The revenger wondered if the showman had remembered him until the end. He thought that might have been the case, for was it not in the man’s nature to forget little, to discard nothing that might prove useful?
He had been fascinated by the Guesser’s talent, had watched him discreetly for an hour or more before he had eventually approached him for the first time on that cool evening close to summer’s end. It was an extraordinary talent to find in such a small, strange-looking little man, surrounded by cheap trinkets in a simple b
ooth: to be able to tell so much at a glance, to deconstruct an individual almost without thinking, forming a picture of his life in the time that it took most people to glance at a clock. From time to time he had come back to this place, and had hidden himself in the crowds, watching the Guesser from a distance. (And even then, had the little man not been aware of him? Had he not seen him scan the crowds uneasily, seeking the eyes that examined him too closely, his nostrils twitching like a rabbit sensing the approach of the fox?) Perhaps that was why he had come back here, as if by some faint chance the Guesser had chosen to remain in this place, seeing out the winter close by the water’s edge instead of fleeing it for warmer climes.
If the revenger had found him here, what would he have said? Teach me. Tell me how I may know the man whom I seek. I will be lied to. I want to learn how to recognize the lie when it comes. Would he have explained why he had come back to this place, and would the little man have believed him? Of course he would, for a lie would not slip past him.
But the Guesser was long gone, and so the revenger was left only with the memory of their single meeting. There had been blood on his hands that day. It had been a comparatively simple task to accomplish: a vulnerable man laid to rest, a man who might have been tempted to barter what he knew for protection from those who sought him. From the moment that he had fled, his time left on this earth had been counted in seconds and minutes, hours and days, and no more than that. As five days became six, he had been found and he had been killed. There was fear at the end, but little pain. It was not for Merrick to torture or torment, though he did not doubt that, in those final moments, as the victim understood the implacable nature of the one who had come for him, there had been torment enough. He was a professional, not a sadist.