The Unquiet

“I swear, the generator had been working fine earlier. Maybe she’d tried to tinker with it. I just don’t know. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Oh God, I didn’t mean for it to happen that way.”

He started to wail. I let him cry for a while, then interrupted him.

“Where did you put her, Otis?”

“I wanted her to rest somewhere nice, near God and the angels. I buried her behind the steeple of the old church. It was the closest I could get to hallowed ground. I couldn’t mark the place or nothing, but she’s there. I sometimes put flowers on the spot in summer. I talk to her. I tell her I’m sorry for what happened.”

“And the private detective? What about Poole?”

“I had nothing to do with that.” He sounded indignant. “He wouldn’t walk away. He kept asking questions. I had to make a call. I buried him in the church too, but away from Lucy. Her place was special.”

“Who killed him?”

“I’ll confess my own sins, but I won’t confess another man’s. It’s not for me to do.”

“Daniel Clay? Was he involved?”

“I never met him,” Otis replied. “I don’t know what happened to him. I just heard the name. You remember now: I didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did. I just wanted her to be warm. I told you: I love children.”

“What was the Project, Otis?”

“The children were the Project,” he replied. “The little children. The others found them and brought them up here. That’s what we called it: the Project. It was our secret.”

“Who were those other men?”

“I can’t tell you. I got nothing more to say to you.”

“Okay, Otis, we’re going to come up there now. We’ll take you somewhere safe.”

But now, as the last minutes of his life slipped slowly by, the barriers that Otis Caswell had erected between himself and the reality of what he had done seemed to fall away.

“Nowhere’s safe,” he said. “I just want it to end.” He drew in a deep breath, stifling another sob. It seemed to give him some strength. “I gotta go now. I gotta let some men in.”

He put the phone down, and the co

“It’s me,” I called.

“In here,” replied Louis, from somewhere to my right.

I followed his voice into a sparsely furnished bedroom. It had whitewashed walls. Exposed beams ran along the ceiling. Otis Caswell was hanging from one of them. There was an overturned chair on the floor, and drops of urine were still falling from his bare feet.

“I was out taking a leak,” said Angel. “I saw-” He struggled to find the words. “I saw the door was open, and I thought I saw men go in, but when we got up here there was nobody but Caswell, and he was already dead.”

I stepped forward and rolled up each sleeve of his shirt in turn. His skin was bare of tattoos. However else he was involved, Otis Caswell was not the man with the eagle on his arm. Angel and Louis looked at me, but said nothing.

“He knew,” I said. “He knew who they were, but he wouldn’t tell.”

Now he was dead, and that knowledge had died with him. Then I remembered the man killed by Frank Merrick. There was still time. First, though, we searched the house, carefully going through drawers and closets, checking the floors and the skirting for any hiding places. It was Angel who found the stash, in the end. There was a hole in the wall behind a half-empty bookcase. It contained bags of photographs, most printed from a computer, and dozens of unmarked videocassettes and DVDs. Angel leafed through a couple of the pictures, then put them down and stepped away. I glanced at them, but did not have the stomach to go through them all. There was no need. I knew what they would contain. Only the faces of the children would change.

Louis gestured at the cassettes and DVDs. There was a metal stand in one corner, dominated by a new flat-screen TV. It looked out of place in Caswell’s home.

“You want to look at these?”

“No. I have to leave,” I said. “Clean down anything you’ve touched, then you get out of here too.”

“You going to call the cops?” asked Angel.

I shook my head. “Not for a couple of hours.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He said that Merrick’s daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He buried her behind the steeple in the forest.”

“You believed him?”

“I don’t know.” I looked at Caswell’s face, purple with blood. I could feel no pity for him, and my only regret was that he had died without revealing more.

“You want us to stay close?” asked Louis.

“Go back to Portland, but stay away from Scarborough. I need to look at a body, then I’ll call you.”

We went outside. The air was still, the forest quiet. There was an alien scent in the air. Behind me, I heard Louis sniff.

“Someone’s been smoking,” he said.

I walked past Caswell’s truck, over short grass and a small vegetable patch, until I came to where the forest began. After a few steps I found it: a roll-up, discarded in the dirt. I lifted it carefully and blew on the tip. It glowed red for an instant, then died. Louis appeared beside me, Angel close behind. They both had guns in their hands. I showed them the cigarette.

“He was here,” I said. “We led him to Caswell.”

“There’s a mark on the little finger of Caswell’s right hand,” said Angel. “Looks like there was a pinkie ring once. No sign of it now.”

I stared into the darkness of the forest, but I had no sense of the presence of another. The Collector was gone.

O’Rourke had done as he had promised. He had left word with the ME’s office to say that I might be able to identify the dead man. I was at the office by seven, and was joined soon after by O’Rourke and a pair of state police detectives, one of whom was Hansen. He didn’t speak as I was led into the icebox to view the body. In total, there were five bodies set to go under the ME’s knife: the unidentified man from the Old Moose Lodge, Mason Dubus, the two Russians, and Merrick. They were so pressed for space that the two Russians were being stored at an undertaker’s office nearby.

“Which one is Merrick?” I asked the ME’s assistant.

The man, whose name I did not know, pointed at the body nearest the wall. It was covered with a white plastic sheet.

“You feeling sorry for him?” It was Hansen. “He killed four men in twelve hours with your gun. You ought to be feeling sorry, but not for him.”

I said nothing. Instead, I stood over the body of Merrick’s killer. I think I even managed to keep my face expressionless when the man’s face was revealed, the red wound on the right side of his forehead still messy with dirt and congealed matter.

“I don’t know him,” I said.

“You sure?” asked O’Rourke.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, as I turned away from the body of Jerry Legere, Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband. “He’s nobody I know.”

They would come back to haunt me, of course, all of the lies and half-truths. They would cost me more than I could then have imagined, although perhaps I had been living on borrowed time for so long that I shouldn’t have been surprised at the consequences. I could have given the detectives all that I knew. I could have told them about Andy Kellog and Otis Caswell and the bodies that might be buried within the walls of a ruined church, but I did not. I don’t know why. I think that maybe it was because I was close to the truth, and I wanted to reveal it for myself.

And even in that I was to be disappointed, for what, in the end, was the truth? Like the lawyer Elwin Stark had said, the only truth was that everybody lied.