The Unquiet

Chapter VI

I slept badly that night, my dreams punctuated by recurrent images of eyeless men who yet could somehow see, and a faceless child curled up in ball in a darkened attic, whispering only the single word “afraid” to herself, over and over again. I checked in with Jackie Garner first thing. It had been a quiet night in Willard, and for that much I was grateful. Je

I went for a run to Prouts Neck, Walter racing ahead of me in the still morning air. This part of Scarborough was still relatively rural, the presence of the yacht club and the country club ensuring that the area retained a certain exclusivity, but elsewhere the town was changing rapidly. It had begun as far back as 1992, when Wal-Mart arrived near the Maine Mall, bringing with it minor irritations like the RV owners who were allowed to park overnight on the store’s lot. Soon, other big-box retailers followed Wal-Mart’s lead, and Scarborough started to become like many other satellite towns on the edge of larger cities. Now residents at Eight Corners were selling out to allow Wal-Mart to expand further, and, despite a cap on residential building permits, more and more families were moving into the area to take advantage of its schools and the town’s recreational pursuits, pushing property prices up and causing increases in taxes to pay for the infrastructure needed to support the new arrivals, who were taking root at four times the county average. In my darker moments, I sometimes saw what was once a fifty- four-square-mile town encompassing six distinct villages, each with its own distinct local identity, and the largest salt marsh in the state, becoming a single homogenous sprawl populated almost entirely by those with no concept of its history and no respect for its past.

There were two messages on my answering machine when I returned. One was from a guy in the DMV who charged me $50 for every search he ran on vehicle plates. According to him, Merrick’s car was a company vehicle recently registered to a law office down in Ly

I thought again about Merrick ’s sudden appearance so many years after Daniel Clay had vanished. Either some evidence had emerged recently to convince Merrick that Clay was still alive, or Merrick had been out of the loop for a long time and had just emerged to rattle a few cages. Increasingly, I was drawn to the view that Merrick might have been in jail, but I didn’t have his first name, assuming Merrick even was his real name. If I had it, I could run searches in corrections.com and bop.gov in the hope of turning up a release date. Still, I could make some calls and see if the name rang any bells, and there was always Eldritch and Associates although, in my experience, lawyers tended to be unhelpful at best in these situations. I wasn’t even sure that Merrick ’s pursuit of Rebecca Clay and the broken pane of glass would be enough to force some information out of them.

The second message was from June Fitzpatrick, confirming our di

Rebecca Clay sat in her employer’s washroom and wiped away her tears. She had just spoken to her daughter on the phone. Je

The night before, she had walked into Je

All in Je

Rebecca had gone downstairs to Je

“Who are they supposed to be, honey?” she said, but Je

“I du

“I mean, are they supposed to be ghosts? They look like ghosts.” Je

“You saw them? How? How could you have seen something like this?”

She had knelt beside her daughter, genuinely troubled by what she was hearing.

“Because they’re real,” Je