That afternoon, I got talking to the young guy behind the bar at the lodge, the one who had witnessed the altercation between Angel and the men from Jersey. His name was Skip, although I didn’t hold that against him, and he was twenty-four and taking his master’s degree in community planning and development at USM. Skip’s father was part-owner of the place, and he told me that he worked there during the summer, and whenever he could spare time in hunting season. He planned on finding a job in Somerset County once he had finished his degree. Unlike some of his peers, he didn’t want to leave. Instead, he hoped to find a way to make it a better place in which to live, although he was smart enough to realize that the odds were currently stacked against the region.
Skip told me that Caswell’s family had lived in these parts for three or four generations, but they’d always been dirt poor. Caswell sometimes worked as a guide during the season, and the rest of the year he picked up jobs as a general handyman, but as the years had gone by he had let the guide work slip, although he was still in demand when repairs needed to be done to local houses. When he had bought the Gilead tract, he’d paid for it without taking out a bank loan. The land hadn’t exactly been cheap, despite what Caswell had told us, even if its history hadn’t made it the most attractive of propositions, and it was more money than anyone expected Otis Caswell to come up with, but he hadn’t bitched about the price or even attempted to bargain with the Realtor, who was selling it on behalf of the descendants of the late Bennett Lumley. Since then, he had posted his no trespassing notices and kept himself pretty much to himself. Nobody bothered him up there. Nobody had cause to.
There were two possibilities, neither of which reflected well on Caswell. The first was that someone had given him the money to make the purchase in order to keep their interest in the land secret, after which Caswell turned a blind eye to the uses to which the restored house was being put. The other possibility was that he was an active participant in what occurred there. Either way, he knew enough to make him worth pursuing. I found his number in the local directory and called him from my room. He picked up on the second ring.
“Expecting a call, Mr. Caswell?” I asked.
“Who is this?”
“We met earlier. My name is Parker.”
He hung up. I dialed again. This time three or four rings went by before he picked up the phone.
“What do you want?” he said. “I told you: I got nothing to say to you.”
“I think you know what I want, Mr. Caswell. I want you to tell me about what went on in that empty house with the Plexiglas windows and the strong door. I want you to tell me about Andy Kellog and Lucy Merrick. If you do that, then maybe I can save you.”
“Save me? Save me from what? What are you talking about?”
“From Frank Merrick.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Don’t call here again,” said Caswell. “I don’t know a Frank Merrick, or any of them other names you said.”
“He’s coming, Otis. You’d better believe that. He wants to know what happened to his daughter. And he’s not going to be reasonable like my friends and me. I think your buddies are going to cut you loose, Otis, and leave you to him. Or maybe they’ll decide that you’re the weak link, and do to you what they did to Daniel Clay.”
“We didn’t—” began Caswell, then caught himself.
“Didn’t what, Otis? Didn’t do anything to Daniel Clay? Didn’t kill him? Why don’t you tell me about it.”
“Fuck you,” said Caswell. “Fuck you to hell and back.”
He hung up. When I called a third time nobody picked up. The phone just rang and rang at the other end, and I pictured Otis Caswell in his white-trash house, his hands over his ears to block out the sound, until at last the ringing changed to a busy signal as he removed the connection from the wall.
Night descended. Our encounter with Caswell marked the beginning of the end. Men were heading northwest, Merrick among them, but the sands of his life were slowly trickling away, not through the neck of some old hourglass but from the palm of his own hand, his fingers clasped tightly against his skin as the dry grains slipped through the gap below his little finger. By asking questions about Daniel Clay, he had shortened the span of his existence. He had held open his hands and accepted the sands, knowing that he would be unable to hold them for long, that now they would peter away twice as fast. He had merely hoped that he could stay alive long enough to discover his daughter’s final resting place.
And so, as darkness fell, Merrick found himself in the Old Moose Lodge. Its name sounded quaint, evoking images of wooden floors, comfortable chairs, friendly Maine hosts to greet the guests, a roaring log fire in the lobby, rooms that managed to be clean and modern while never losing touch with their rustic roots, and breakfasts of maple syrup, bacon, and pancakes, served by smiling young women at tables overlooking placid lakes and mile upon mile of evergreen forest.
In fact, nobody had ever stayed in the Old Moose Lodge, at least not in a bed. In the past, men might have slept off their drunks in a back room, but they had done so on the floor, so stupefied by alcohol that comfort mattered less than a place in which to lie flat and allow the blankness they had been seeking to overwhelm them. Now even that small concession had been taken away for fear that the lodge’s liquor license, annual speculation about the renewal of which provided regular fodder for the local newspaper, and most of the populace, might finally be removed if it was found to be operating as a crash pad for drunks. Still, the impression created by its name was not entirely inapt.
It did have wooden floors.
Merrick sat at a deuce near the back of the bar, facing away from the door but with a mirror on the wall in front of him that allowed him to see all those who entered without anyone immediately being able to spot him. Although the bar was warm, causing him to sweat profusely, he did not take off his heavy tan suede coat. In part, it enabled him to keep the gun in its pocket within easy reach. It also meant that the wound in his side, which had begun to bleed again, would not be visible if it soaked through the bandages and into his shirt. He had killed the Russians just beyond Bingham, where Stream Road branched off the 201 and followed the path of the Austin Stream toward Mayfield Township. He had known that they would come. The killing of Demarcian alone might have been enough to draw them to him, but there were also grudges outstanding against him relating to a pair of jobs at the beginning of the nineties, one in Little Odessa, the other in Boston. He was surprised that they had not made a move on him in prison, but the Supermax had protected him by isolating him, and his reputation had done the rest. After the killing of Demarcian, word would have spread. Calls would have been made, favors requested, debts wiped out. Perhaps he should not have killed Demarcian, but the little man with the withered arm had repelled him, and he was a link in the chain of events that had taken Merrick’s daughter from him. If nothing else, the lawyer Eldritch had been right about that much. If the price to be paid for Demarcian’s death was more killing, then Merrick was willing to oblige. They would not stop him from reaching Gilead. There, he felt certain, he would find the answers that he sought.
He wondered how the Russians had found him so quickly. After all, he had changed his car, yet here they were, those two men in their black 4x4. Merrick reflected that perhaps he should not have left Rebecca Clay’s exhusband alive, but Merrick was not a man who killed without some cause and, as far he could tell, Legere knew nothing. Even his ex-wife had not trusted him enough to share anything about her father with him.
But Merrick was also certain that, almost since his quest had begun, his progress was being shadowed and his every move watched. He thought of the old lawyer in his paper-filled office, and his unseen benefactor, the mysterious other who had instructed Eldritch to help him, who had provided funds, a place to hide, and information. The lawyer had never provided a satisfactory explanation for his willingness to aid Merrick, and Merrick’s distrust of him had quickly grown, leading him to distance himself from the old man as soon as was feasible, the period of his recent brief incarceration apart. Yet even after that, when he was taking care to cover his tracks, there were times when he had felt himself being watched, sometimes when he was in a crowd, trying to lose himself in a mall or a bar, and other times when he was alone. He thought that he had caught a glimpse of a man once, a ragged figure in an old black coat, who was examining Merrick thoughtfully through a cloud of cigarette smoke but, when he tried to follow him, the man had vanished, and Merrick had not seen him again. Then there were the nightmares. They had begun in the safe house, shortly after Merrick had been given the car and the money by Eldritch: visions of pale, wasted creatures, their eye sockets black, their mouths lipless and wrinkled, all dressed in soiled tan coats, old mackintoshes with buttons missing and reddish brown stains on the collars and the sleeves. Merrick would awaken in the darkness, and in that moment between sleeping and consciousness he thought that he could almost see them receding from him, as though they had been leaning over him while he slept, no breath emerging from their mouths, only a stale smell of something old and noxious lodged deep within themselves. Since he had abandoned the safe house, the dreams had come less often, but there were still nights when he ascended from the depths of sleep to a crawling sensation on his skin and a faint stench that had not been there when he closed his eyes. Had Eldritch, reckoning Merrick to be a liability, told the Russians where he was, facilitated by the other, or by the man in the ragged black coat? Were this man and Eldritch’s client one and the same? Merrick did not know, and it no longer mattered. It was all nearing an end, and soon there would be peace.