The Unquiet

Chapter XVII

Eldritch arrived in Maine early on Monday morning, accompanied by a younger man who had the distracted yet slightly desperate air of an alcoholic who has forgotten where the bottle is hidden. Eldritch allowed his companion to make all of the ru

The judge, whose name was Nola Hight, was no fool. In her fifteen years at the bench she had heard just about every excuse known to man, and she wasn’t about to take Eldritch at face value.

“Your client spent ten years in jail for attempted murder, Mr. Eldritch,” she said.

“Aggravated assault, Your Honor,” Eldritch’s young assistant corrected. Judge Hight glared at him so hard his hair started to singe.

“With respect, Your Honor, I’m not sure that is relevant to the matter before the court,” said Eldritch, attempting to smooth the judge’s ruffled feathers through tone alone. “My client served his time for that offense. He is a changed man, chastened by his experiences.”

Judge Hight gave Eldritch a look that would have reduced a lesser man to charred flesh. Eldritch merely wavered where he stood, as though his brittle form had been briefly buffeted by a gentle breeze.

“He will be chastened for the maximum term allowable under law if he comes before this court again in co

“Indisputably,” said Eldritch. “Your Honor is as reasonable as she is wise.”

Judge Hight debated finding him in contempt of court for sarcasm, then gave up.

“Get the hell out of my courtroom,” she said.

It was still early, barely after ten. Merrick was due for release at eleven, once his paperwork had been processed. When they let him out of the Cumberland County lockup, I was waiting, and I served him with the court order forbidding further contact with Rebecca Clay on pain of imprisonment and/or a fine. He took it, read it carefully, then slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. He looked crumpled and tired, the way most people did after a couple of nights in a cell.

“That was low, what you did,” he said.

“You mean setting the cops on you? You were terrorizing a young woman. That also seems kind of low. You need to reconsider your standards. They’re all screwed up.”

He might have heard me, but he wasn’t really listening. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at a spot somewhere over my right shoulder, letting me know that I wasn’t even worthy of eye contact.

“Men ought to deal with each other like men,” he continued, red rising into his face as though he were being boiled from below. “You set the hounds on me when all I wanted to do was talk. You and missy both, you got no honor.”

“Let me buy you breakfast,” I said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

Merrick waved a hand in dismissal.

“Keep your breakfast and your talk. The time for talking with you is done.”

“You may not believe this, but I have some sympathy for you,” I said. “You want to find out what happened to your daughter. I know what that feels like. If I can help you, then I will, but scaring Rebecca Clay isn’t the way to go about it. If you approach her again, you’ll be picked up and put back behind bars: the Cumberland County lockup if you’re lucky, but Warren if you’re not. That could be another year out of your life, another year spent not getting any closer to finding out the truth about your daughter’s disappearance.”

Merrick looked at me for the first time since we’d begun talking.

“I’m done with the Clay woman,” he said. “But I ain’t done with you. I’ll give you some advice, though, in return for what you just gave me. Stay out of this, and maybe I’ll be merciful the next time our paths cross.”

With that he pushed past me and began walking toward the bus station. He looked smaller than before, his shoulders slightly hunched, his jeans stained from his time behind bars. Once again, I felt pity for him. Despite all that I knew about him, and all that he was suspected of doing, he was still a father seeking his lost child. Perhaps it was all he had left, but I knew the damage that could be caused by that kind of single-minded intensity. I knew because I had once wrought it myself. Rebecca Clay might be safe from him, at least for the present, but Merrick was not going to stop. He would keep looking until he found out the truth, or until someone forced him to desist. Either way, it could only end with a death.

I called Rebecca and told her that I didn’t believe Merrick would trouble her for the time being, but there were no guarantees.

“I understand,” she said. “I don’t want men outside my house any longer, though. I can’t live that way. Will you thank them for me, and bill me?”

“One last thing, Ms. Clay,” I said. “If the choice was given to you, would you want your father found?”

She thought about the question.

“Wherever he is, he made the choice that brought him there,” she said softly. “I told you before: I think sometimes about Jim Poole. He went away, and he never came back. I like to pretend that I don’t know if it was because of me, if he vanished because I asked him to look for my father, or if something else happened to him, something equally bad. But when I can’t sleep, when I’m lying alone in my room in the darkness, I know it was my fault. In the daylight, I can convince myself that it wasn’t, but I know the truth. I don’t know you, Mr. Parker. I asked you to help me, and you did, and I’ll pay you for your time and your efforts, but we don’t know each other. If something were to happen to you because you asked questions about my father, then we’d be bound by it, and I don’t want to be bound to you, not like that. Do you understand? I’m trying to let it go. I want you to do the same.”

She hung up. Maybe she was right. Maybe Daniel Clay should be left wherever he was, either above or below ground. But it wasn’t up to her, or me, not any longer. Merrick was out there, and so was the person who had instructed Eldritch to bankroll him. Rebecca Clay’s part in this might have been over, but mine wasn’t.

When the Maine State Prison was based in Thomaston, it was hard to miss. It stood slap bang on the main road into town, a massive edifice on Route 1 that had survived two fires and, even after being rebuilt, renovated, extended, and occasionally updated, still resembled the early-nineteenth-century penitentiary that it had once been. It felt like the town itself had developed around the prison, although in truth there had been a trading post at Thomaston since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the prison dominated the landscape of the community, both physically and, perhaps, psychologically. If one mentioned Thomaston to anyone in Maine, the first thing that came to mind was the penitentiary. I wondered sometimes what it was like to live in a place whose principal claim to fame was the incarceration of human beings. It might have been that, after a while, you just forgot about it, or failed to notice the effect it had on the people and the town. Perhaps it was only those who visited Thomaston who immediately felt that an oppressive miasma hung over the place, as though the misery of those locked behind the prison’s walls had seeped into the atmosphere, coloring it with gray, weighing it down like particles of lead in the air. Then again, it certainly kept the crime rate low. Thomaston was the kind of place where there was a violent crime once every two or three years, and its crime index was about one-third of the national average. It might have been that the presence of a huge prison on the doorstep made those tempted by a life of crime reconsider their career options.