The White Road

“Hell, Bear here is uneasy just having this other guy in the room,” Sundquist confirmed. “Mr. Parker has a reputation for violence.” Bear, all six-three and three hundred pounds of him, tried his best to make it look like he was troubled by my presence. He was, although not for any reason to do with the Blythes or the unlikely possibility that I could actually hurt him.

My gaze upon him was unflinching.

I know you, Bear, and I don’t believe a word you’re saying. Don’t do this. Stop it now before it goes too far.

Bear, having finished up his story for the second time, released a relieved breath. Sundquist patted him softly on the back and arranged his features into the best expression of concern he could muster. Sundquist had been around for about fifteen years and his reputation had been okay, if not exactly great, for much of that, but lately he’d suffered some reverses: a divorce, rumors of gambling problems. The Blythes were a cash cow that he couldn’t afford to lose.

Irving Blythe remained quiet when Bear had finished. It was his wife, Ruth, who was the first to speak. She reached out and touched her husband’s arm.

“ Irving,” she said. “I think-”

But he raised his hand and she stopped talking immediately. I had mixed feelings about Irving Blythe. He was old school, and sometimes treated his wife like she was a second-class citizen. He had been a senior manager at International Paper in Jay, facing down the United Paper Workers International Union when it sought to organize labor in the north woods in the 1980s. The seventeen-month-long walkout at International during 1987 and 1988 was one of the bitterest strikes in the state’s history, with over one thousand workers replaced in the course of the action. Irv Blythe had been a staunch opponent of compromise, and the company had sweetened his retirement package considerably as a mark of its appreciation when he eventually called it a day and moved back to Portland. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t love his daughter, or that her disappearance hadn’t aged him in the last six years, the weight falling from his body like water from melting ice. His white shirt hung limply from his arms and his chest, and the gap between its collar and his neck could have accommodated my fist. His trousers were cinched tightly at the waist, billowing out emptily where once they would have been filled by his ass and his thighs. Everything about him spoke of absence and loss.

“I think you and I should talk, Mr. Blythe.” It was Sundquist. “In private,” he added, with a meaningful look at Ruth Blythe in the process, a look that said that this was men’s talk, not to be obstructed or diverted by the emotions of women, no matter how sincerely felt they might be.

Blythe rose and Sundquist followed him into the kitchen, leaving his wife seated on the sofa. Bear stood and removed a pack of Marlboros from his vest pocket.

“I’ll step outside to smoke, ma’am,” he said.

Ruth Blythe just nodded and watched Bear’s departing bulk, her clenched right fist close to her mouth, tensing to defend herself from a blow that she had already received. It was Mrs. Blythe who had encouraged her husband to dispense with the services of Sundquist. He had acceded only because of Sundquist’s proven lack of progress, but I got the feeling that he didn’t like me very much. His wife was a small woman, but small the way terriers are small, her size masking her energy and tenacity. I recalled the news reports of Cassie Blythe’s disappearance, Irving and Ruth seated together at a table, Ellis Howard, the Portland PD’s deputy chief, beside them, a picture of Cassie clasped tightly in Ruth Blythe’s hands. She had given me the tapes of the press conference to look at when I had agreed to review the case, along with news cuttings, photographs, and increasingly slim progress reports from Sundquist. Six years ago, I might have said that Cassie Blythe resembled her father more than her mother, but as the years had gone by, it seemed to me more and more that it was Ruth to whom Cassie bore the greatest resemblance. The expression in her eyes, her smile, even her hair now seemed more like Cassie’s than ever before. In a strange way, it was almost as if Ruth Blythe were somehow transforming herself, acquiring facets of her daughter’s appearance, so that by doing so she might become both daughter and wife to her husband, keeping some part of Cassie alive even as the shadow of her loss grew longer and longer upon them.

“He’s lying, isn’t he?” she asked me when Bear was gone.

For a moment, I was about to lie in turn, to tell her that I wasn’t sure, that nothing could be ruled out, but I couldn’t say those things to her. She deserved better than to be lied to; but then, she deserved better than to be told that there was no hope and that her daughter would never return to her.

“I think so,” I said.

“Why would he do that? Why would he try to hurt us like this?”

“I don’t think he is trying to hurt you, Mrs. Blythe, not Bear. He’s just easily led.”

“It’s Sundquist, isn’t it?”

This time, I didn’t reply.

“Let me go talk to Bear,” I said. I stood and moved toward the front door. In the window, I saw Ruth Blythe reflected, the torment clear on her face as she struggled between her desire to grasp the slim hope offered by Bear and her knowledge that it would come apart like ash in her hand if she tried.

Outside, I found Bear puffing on a cigarette and trying to entice the Blythes’ dog over to play with him. The dog was ignoring him.

“Hey, Bear.”

I recalled Bear from my youth, when he had been only slightly smaller and marginally dumber. He had lived in a small house on Acorn, off Spurwink Road, with his mother, his two older sisters, and his stepfather. They were decent people: his mother worked at the Woolworth and his stepfather drove a delivery van for a soda company. They were dead now, but his sisters still lived close by, one in East Buxton and the other in South Windham, which was convenient for visiting when Bear spent three months in the Windham Correctional Facility for assault at the age of twenty. It was Bear’s first taste of jail and he was lucky not to serve more in the years that followed. He did a little driving for some guys out of Riverton then departed for California following a territorial dispute that left one man dead and another crippled for life. Bear wasn’t involved but scores were about to be settled and his sisters encouraged him to go away. Far away. He’d picked up some kitchen cleaning work in LA, had once again drifted into bad company and had ended up in Mule Creek. There was no real malice in Bear, although that didn’t make him any less dangerous. He was a weapon to be wielded by others, open to promises of money, work, or maybe just companionship. Bear saw the world only through bewildered eyes. Now he had come home, but he seemed as lost and out of place as ever.

“I can’t talk to you,” he said, as I stood beside him.

“Why not?”

“Mr. Sundquist told me not to. He said you’d just fuck things up.”

“What things?”

Bear smiled and wagged a finger at me. “Uh-uh. I ain’t that dumb.”

I took a step onto the grass and squatted down, my palms out. Immediately, the dog rose up and approached me slowly, its tail wagging. When it reached me, it sniffed my fingers then buried its muzzle in the palms of my hands as I scratched its ears.

“How come he wouldn’t do that for me?” asked Bear. He sounded hurt.

“Maybe you scared him,” I replied, then felt bad as I saw the regret on his face. “Could be he smells my own dog on me, though. Yeah, you scared of big Bear, fella? He’s not so scary.”

Bear squatted down beside me, moving as slowly and unthreateningly as his bulk permitted, then brushed his huge fingers against the hair on the dog’s skull. Its eyes flicked toward him in mild alarm and I felt it tense, until slowly it began to relax as it realized the big man meant it no harm. Its eyes closed in pleasure beneath the joint pressure of our fingers.