The Unquiet

“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 six years ago, maybe a little more. 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.”

“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 believe it too, 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 kind 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 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 produced only 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.”