The White Road

1


B EAR SAID THAT he had seen the dead girl.

It was one week earlier, one week before the descent on Caina that would leave three men dead. The sunlight had fallen prey to predatory clouds, filthy and gray like the smoke from a garbage fire. There was a stillness that presaged rain. Outside, the Blythes’ mongrel dog lay uneasily on the lawn, its body flat, its head resting between its front paws, its eyes open and troubled. The Blythes lived on Dartmouth Street in Portland, overlooking Back Cove and the waters of Casco Bay. Usually, there were birds around—seagulls, ducks, teal—but nothing flew that day. It was a world painted on glass, waiting to be shattered by unseen forces. We sat in silence in the small living room. Bear, listless, glanced out of the window, as if waiting for the first drops of rain to fall and confirm some unspoken fear. No shadows moved on the polished oak floors, not even our own. I could hear the ticking of the china clock on the mantel, surrounded by photographs from happier times. I found myself staring at an image of Cassie Blythe clutching a mortarboard to her head as the wind tried to make off with it, its tassel raised and spread like the plumage of an alarmed bird. She had frizzy black hair and lips that were slightly too big for her face, and her smile was a little uncertain, but her brown eyes were peaceful and untouched by sadness.

Bear tore himself away from the daylight and tried to meet the gaze of Irving Blythe and his wife, but failed and looked instead to his feet. His eyes had avoided mine from the beginning, refusing even to acknowledge my presence in the room. He was a big man, wearing worn blue jeans, a green T-shirt, and a leather vest that was now too small to comfortably accommodate his bulk. His beard had grown long and straggly in prison, and his shoulder-length hair was greasy and unkempt. He had acquired some jailhouse tattoos in the years since I had last seen him: a poorly executed figure of a woman on his right forearm and a dagger beneath his left ear. His eyes were blue and sleepy, and sometimes he had trouble remembering the details of his story. He seemed a pathetic figure, a man whose future was all behind him. When his pauses grew too long, his companion would touch Bear’s big arm and speak for him, nudging the tale gently along until Bear found his way back onto the winding path of his recollection. Bear’s escort wore a powder blue suit over a white shirt and the knot on his red tie was so large it looked like a growth erupting from his throat. He had silver hair and a year-round tan. His name was Arnold Sundquist and he was a private investigator. Sundquist had been dealing with the Cassie Blythe case, until a friend of the Blythes had suggested that they should talk to me instead. Unofficially, and probably unprofessionally, I had advised them to dispense with the services of Arnold Sundquist, to whom they were paying a retainer of fifteen hundred dollars per month, ostensibly to look for their daughter. She had disappeared six years earlier, shortly after her graduation, and had not been heard from since. Sundquist was the second private investigator that the Blythes had hired to look into the circumstances of Cassie’s disappearance and he couldn’t have looked more like a parasite if there had been hooks on his mouth. Sundquist was so slick that when he took a swim in the sea, birds farther down the coast got oil on their feathers. I figured that he had managed to bilk them out of maybe thirty grand in the two years that he had supposedly been working on their behalf. Steady earners like the Blythes are hard to come by in Portland. No wonder he was now trying to regain their trust, and their money.

Ruth Blythe had called me barely an hour earlier to tell me that Sundquist was coming over, claiming to have news about Cassie. I had been chopping maple and birch as firewood for the coming winter when she called and didn’t have time to change. There was sap on my hands, on my tattered jeans, and on my “Arm the Lonely” T-shirt. Now here was Bear, fresh out of Mule Creek State Pen, his pockets rattling with cheap pharmaceuticals bought from flyblown drugstores in Tijuana, his parole transferred home, telling us how he had seen the dead girl. Because Cassie Blythe was dead. I knew it, and I suspected that her parents knew it too. I think maybe they had felt it at the very moment of her death, some tearing or wrenching in their hearts, and had understood instinctively that something had happened to their only child, that she would never be returning home to them, though they kept her room clean, dusting carefully once each week, changing the bedclothes twice each month so that they would be fresh for her in case she eventually appeared at their door, bearing with her fantastic stories to explain away six years of silence. Until they learned otherwise, there was always the chance that Cassie might still be alive, even as the clock on the mantel tolled softly the knowledge of her passing. Bear had pulled three years in California for receiving stolen goods. Bear was kind of dumb that way. He was so dumb he would steal stuff he already owned. Bear was too dumb to know Cassie Blythe from a Dumpster, but still he ran through the details of the story again, stumbling occasionally, his face contorted with the effort of recalling the details that I was sure he had been forced to learn from Sundquist: how he had traveled down to Mexico after his release from Mule Creek to stock up on cheap drugs for his nerves; how he had come across Cassie Blythe drinking with an older Mexican in a bar on the Boulevard Agua Caliente, close by the racetrack; how he’d spoken to her when the guy went to the john and had heard the Mainer in her; how the guy had come back and told Bear to mind his own business before hustling Cassie into a waiting car. Somebody at the bar said the man’s name was Hector, and he had a place down in Rosarito Beach. Bear didn’t have any money to follow them, but he was sure that the woman he had seen was Cassie Blythe. He remembered her photograph from the newspapers that his sister used to send to him to pass the time while he was in jail, even though Bear couldn’t read a parking meter, let alone a newspaper. She had even looked over her shoulder at him when he called her name. He didn’t think that she looked unhappy or that she was being held against her will. Still, when he got back to Portland the first thing he did was to contact Mr. Sundquist, because Mr. Sundquist was the private detective named in the newspaper reports. Mr. Sundquist had told Bear that he was no longer involved in the case, that a new PI had taken over. Bear, though, would only work with Mr. Sundquist. He trusted him. He’d heard good things about him. No, if the Blythes wanted Bear’s help in Mexico, then Bear wanted Mr. Sundquist back on the case. Sundquist, nodding along gently beside Bear, straightened up at this point in Bear’s narrative and looked disapprovingly at me.

“Hell, Bear here is uneasy just having this other guy in the room,” Sundquist confirmed. “Mr. Parker has a reputation for violence.” Bear, all six-three and three hundred pounds of him, tried his best to make it look like he was troubled by my presence. He was, although not for any reason to do with the Blythes or the unlikely possibility that I could actually hurt him. My gaze upon him was unflinching.

I know you, Bear, and I don’t believe a word you’re saying. Don’t do this. Stop it now before it goes too far.

Bear, having finished up his story for the second time, released a relieved breath. Sundquist patted him softly on the back and arranged his features into the best expression of concern he could muster. Sundquist had been around for about fifteen years and his reputation had been okay, if not exactly great, for much of that, but lately he’d suffered some reverses: a divorce, rumors of gambling problems. The Blythes were a cash cow that he couldn’t afford to lose. Irving Blythe remained quiet when Bear had finished. It was his wife, Ruth, who was the first to speak. She reached out and touched her husband’s arm.

“Irving,” she said. “I think—”

But he raised his hand and she stopped talking immediately. I had mixed feelings about Irving Blythe. He was old school, and sometimes treated his wife like she was a second-class citizen. He had been a senior manager at International Paper in Jay, facing down the United Paper Workers International Union when it sought to organize labor in the north woods in the 1980s. The seventeen-month-long walkout at International during 1987 and 1988 was one of the bitterest strikes in the state’s history, with over one thousand workers replaced in the course of the action. Irv Blythe had been a staunch opponent of compromise, and the company had sweetened his retirement package considerably as a mark of its appreciation when he eventually called it a day and moved back to Portland. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t love his daughter, or that her disappearance hadn’t aged him in the last six years, the weight falling from his body like water from melting ice. His white shirt hung limply from his arms and his chest, and the gap between its collar and his neck could have accommodated my fist. His trousers were cinched tightly at the waist, billowing out emptily where once they would have been filled by his ass and his thighs. Everything about him spoke of absence and loss.

“I think you and I should talk, Mr. Blythe.” It was Sundquist. “In private,” he added, with a meaningful look at Ruth Blythe in the process, a look that said that this was men’s talk, not to be obstructed or diverted by the emotions of women, no matter how sincerely felt they might be. Blythe rose and Sundquist followed him into the kitchen, leaving his wife seated on the sofa. Bear stood and removed a pack of Marlboros from his vest pocket.

“I’ll step outside to smoke, ma’am,” he said.

Ruth Blythe just nodded and watched Bear’s departing bulk, her clenched right fist close to her mouth, tensing to defend herself from a blow that she had already received. It was Mrs. Blythe who had encouraged her husband to dispense with the services of Sundquist. He had acceded only because of Sundquist’s proven lack of progress, but I got the feeling that he didn’t like me very much. His wife was a small woman, but small the way terriers are small, her size masking her energy and tenacity. I recalled the news reports of Cassie Blythe’s disappearance, Irving and Ruth seated together at a table, Ellis Howard, the Portland PD’s deputy chief, beside them, a picture of Cassie clasped tightly in Ruth Blythe’s hands. She had given me the tapes of the press conference to look at when I had agreed to review the case, along with news cuttings, photographs, and increasingly slim progress reports from Sundquist. Six years ago, I might have said that Cassie Blythe resembled her father more than her mother, but as the years had gone by, it seemed to me more and more that it was Ruth to whom Cassie bore the greatest resemblance. The expression in her eyes, her smile, even her hair now seemed more like Cassie’s than ever before. In a strange way, it was almost as if Ruth Blythe were somehow transforming herself, acquiring facets of her daughter’s appearance, so that by doing so she might become both daughter and wife to her husband, keeping some part of Cassie alive even as the shadow of her loss grew longer and longer upon them.

“He’s lying, isn’t he?” she asked me when Bear was gone.

For a moment, I was about to lie in turn, to tell her that I wasn’t sure, that nothing could be ruled out, but I couldn’t say those things to her. She deserved better than to be lied to; but then, she deserved better than to be told that there was no hope and that her daughter would never return to her.

“I think so,” I said.

“Why would he do that? Why would he try to hurt us like this?”

“I don’t think he is trying to hurt you, Mrs. Blythe, not Bear. He’s just easily led.”

“It’s Sundquist, isn’t it?”

This time, I didn’t reply.

“Let me go talk to Bear,” I said. I stood and moved toward the front door. In the window, I saw Ruth Blythe reflected, the torment clear on her face as she struggled between her desire to grasp the slim hope offered by Bear and her knowledge that it would come apart like ash in her hand if she tried.

Outside, I found Bear puffing on a cigarette and trying to entice the Blythes’ dog over to play with him. The dog was ignoring him.

“Hey, Bear.”

I recalled Bear from my youth, when he had been only slightly smaller and marginally dumber. He had lived in a small house on Acorn, off Spurwink Road, with his mother, his two older sisters, and his stepfather. They were decent people: his mother worked at the Woolworth and his stepfather drove a delivery van for a soda company. They were dead now, but his sisters still lived close by, one in East Buxton and the other in South Windham, which was convenient for visiting when Bear spent three months in the Windham Correctional Facility for assault at the age of twenty. It was Bear’s first taste of jail and he was lucky not to serve more in the years that followed. He did a little driving for some guys out of Riverton then departed for California following a territorial dispute that left one man dead and another crippled for life. Bear wasn’t involved but scores were about to be settled and his sisters encouraged him to go away. Far away. He’d picked up some kitchen cleaning work in LA, had once again drifted into bad company and had ended up in Mule Creek. There was no real malice in Bear, although that didn’t make him any less dangerous. He was a weapon to be wielded by others, open to promises of money, work, or maybe just companionship. Bear saw the world only through bewildered eyes. Now he had come home, but he seemed as lost and out of place as ever.

“I can’t talk to you,” he said, as I stood beside him.

“Why not?”

“Mr. Sundquist told me not to. He said you’d just fuck things up.”

“What things?”

Bear smiled and wagged a finger at me. “Uh-uh. I ain’t that dumb.”

I took a step onto the grass and squatted down, my palms out. Immediately, the dog rose up and approached me slowly, its tail wagging. When it reached me, it sniffed my fingers then buried its muzzle in the palms of my hands as I scratched its ears.

“How come he wouldn’t do that for me?” asked Bear. He sounded hurt.

“Maybe you scared him,” I replied, then felt bad as I saw the regret on his face. “Could be he smells my own dog on me, though. Yeah, you scared of big Bear, fella? He’s not so scary.”

Bear squatted down beside me, moving as slowly and unthreateningly as his bulk permitted, then brushed his huge fingers against the hair on the dog’s skull. Its eyes flicked toward him in mild alarm and I felt it tense, until slowly it began to relax as it realized the big man meant it no harm. Its eyes closed in pleasure beneath the joint pressure of our fingers.

“This was Cassie Blythe’s dog, Bear,” I said, and watched as Bear’s hand paused momentarily in its exploration of the animal’s fur.

“It’s a nice dog,” he said.

“Yes, it is. Bear, why are you doing this?”

He didn’t respond, but I saw the guilt flicker in the depths of his eyes, like a small stray fish sensing the approach of a predator. He tried to take his hand away, but the dog lifted its muzzle and pressed at his fingers until he went back to petting it. I left him to it.

“I know you don’t want to hurt anybody, Bear. You remember my grandfather?” My grandfather had been a Cumberland County sheriff’s deputy.

Bear nodded silently.