The White Road

“Come on,” she said, and her eyes shone with a new hunger. “Let’s go home.”

But there was a car standing in the driveway of the house when we arrived. I recognized it as soon as I glimpsed it through the trees: Irving Blythe’s Lincoln. When we pulled up he opened his door and stepped out, the sound of classical music from NPR flowing like honey into the still evening air. Rachel said hi and headed into the house. I watched as the lights went on in our bedroom and the shades came down. Irv Blythe had picked his moment perfectly if he was trying to come between me and an active love life.

“How can I help you, Mr. Blythe?” I asked, my tone betraying the fact that right now helping him was pretty low down on my list of priorities.

His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his short-sleeved shirt tucked tightly into the elastic waistband. His pants were shucked up high over what remained of his paunch, making his legs look too long for his body. We had spoken little since I had agreed to look into the circumstances of his daughter’s disappearance. Instead, I dealt mostly with his wife. I had gone back over the police reports, begun to speak again to those who had seen Cassie in the days before she disappeared, and retraced her movements in those final days; but too much time had elapsed for those who recalled her to remember anything new. In some cases, they had trouble remembering anything at all. I had come up with nothing remarkable so far, but I had declined the offer of a retainer similar to that enjoyed for so long by Sundquist. I told the Blythes that I would bill them for my time, nothing more. Yet if Irv Blythe wasn’t openly hostile toward me, he still left me with the sense that he would have preferred it if I had not become involved in the investigation. I was not sure how the events of the previous day would affect our relationship. As it turned out, it was Blythe who brought them up.

“Yesterday, at the house…” he began, then stopped.

I waited.

“My wife thinks I owe you an apology.” His face was very red.

“What do you think?”

He was nothing if not blunt.

“I think I wanted to believe Sundquist and that man he brought with him. I resented you for taking away the hope they brought with them.”

“It was false hope, Mr. Blythe.”

“Mr. Parker, until now we’ve had no hope at all.”

He removed his hands from his pockets and started to dig at the skin in the center of his palms, hoping to locate the source of his pain there and remove it like a splinter. I noticed half-healed sores on the back of his hands and the exposed patches of his scalp, where he had torn at himself in his hurt and frustration.

It was time to clear the air between us.

“I get the sense that you don’t like me very much,” I said.

His right hand stopped digging and flailed loosely at the air, as if he were trying to grasp his feelings toward me, to snatch them from the air so he could display them on his wrinkled, gouged palm instead of being forced to put them into words.

“It’s not that,” he began. “I’m sure that you’re very good at what you do. It’s just that I know about you. I’ve read the newspaper reports. I know that you solve difficult cases, that you’ve found out the truth about people who’ve been missing for years, longer even than Cassie. The trouble is, Mr. Parker, that those people are usually dead when you find them.” The final words came out in a rush, and left him with a tremble in his voice. “I want my daughter back alive.”

“And you think that hiring me is like an admission that she’s gone forever?”

“Something like that.”

Irv Blythe’s words seemed to open wounds inside me that, like his own exposed sores, were only half healed. There were those whom I had failed to save, that was true, and there were others who were long gone before I had even begun to understand the nature of what had been visited upon them. But I had made an accommodation with my past, a recognition that although I had failed to protect individuals, had even failed to protect my own wife and child, I was not entirely responsible for what had happened to them. Susan and Je

I opened his car door for him. “It’s getting late, Mr. Blythe. I’m sorry that I can’t offer you the reassurance that you want. All I can say is that I’ll keep asking questions. I’ll keep trying.”

He nodded and looked out over the marsh, but made no move to get into his car. The moonlight shone on the waters, and the sight of the gleaming cha

“I know she’s dead, Mr. Parker,” he said softly. “I know that she’s not coming home to us alive. All I want is to put her to rest somewhere pretty and quiet where she can be at peace. I don’t believe in closure. I don’t believe that this thing will ever be closed to us. I just want to lay her down, and to be able to go to her with my wife and place flowers at her feet. You understand?”

I almost reached out and touched him, but Irving Blythe was not a man for such gestures between men. Instead, I spoke to him as gently as I could.

“I understand, Mr. Blythe. Drive carefully. I’ll be in touch.”

He climbed into his car and didn’t look at me until he had turned toward the road. Then I saw his eyes in the rearview, and caught the hatred in them for the words that I had somehow forced him to speak, the admission that I had drawn from deep inside him.

I didn’t join Rachel, not for some time. I sat on my porch and watched the passing lights of solitary cars until the biting of the insects forced me inside. By then, Rachel was asleep, and yet she smiled as she felt me close beside her.

Beside both of them.

That night a car drew up outside Elliot Norton’s house on the outskirts of Grace Falls. Elliot heard the car door opening, then footsteps ru

He lay on his back in the moonlight and watched his house burn.

And as Elliot Norton’s house flamed far to the south, I awoke to the sound of a car idling on Old County Road. Rachel was asleep beside me, something clicking inside her air passages as she breathed, a soft noise as regular as the ticking of a metronome. Gently, I slipped from beneath the covers and walked to the window.

In the moonlight, an old black Cadillac Coupe de Ville stood on the bridge that crossed the marshes. Even from a distance, I could see the dents and scratches on the paintwork, the broken-limb curve of the damaged front bumper, and the spiderweb tracery of cracked glass in the corner of the windshield. I could hear its engine rumbling but no smoke came from the exhaust; and though the moon was bright that night I could not glimpse the interior of the car through the dark glass of the windows.

I had seen such a car before. It had been driven by a being named Stritch, a foul creature, pale and deformed. But Stritch was dead, a hole torn in his chest, and the car had been destroyed.

Then the rear door of the Cadillac opened. I waited for someone to emerge, but no one did. Instead the car just stood, its door wide open, for a minute or two until an unseen hand pulled the door closed, the coffin-lid thud coming to me across water and grass, and the car moved away, executing a U-turn to head northwest toward Oak Hill and Route 1.