Nocturnes

The second set of photographs began with five scenes of Ray’s house, the one currently occupied by his wife and her toy boy. Casey Tillman was in each of the pictures, mostly getting into or out of his car, or greeting Edna Czabo with a kiss and an embrace. It looked like Ray wasn’t as happy about staying out of his wife’s affairs as she appeared to be about staying out of his.

Casey was also in two more photographs, this time taken outside the garage that bore his name. There were two other men in the pictures with him. One looked like the Missing Link, assuming the Missing Link had learned to tie its own shoelaces. The other was Gu

It wasn’t a good idea for Ray Czabo to be shooting clandestine photographs of Tillman, but maybe he hoped to win back his wife by showing her that her lover hadn’t entirely cut off relations with his criminal father. Somehow I felt Ray was clutching at straws. Edna Czabo had a new man in her life, one that was a lot younger than the old one, and with a little grit to him. Since she wasn’t ru

The last photographs were all images of the Grady house, taken from every possible angle short of dangling upside down from the drainpipe. According to the digital date imprinted in the right-hand corner of the frames, they were all shot a couple of weeks before, in the space of about fifteen minutes. Ray had even managed to photograph the interior of the house through cracks in the window boards. I quickly flicked through them once, and saw nothing to make them stand out in any way. I went through them again, this time more slowly, and found a detail in the second-to-last photo that made me pause.

It was the photograph Ray had taken by pressing the camera to the boards. Most of the image was obscured by the reflection of the flash on the glass, but the left-hand side was relatively clear. It showed the mirror on the wall of the reception room, the same mirror that I had seen when I first entered the house.

Reflected in the glass was the shape of a man. I could just make out his back, which was clothed in a dark jacket, but his face was not visible. His reflection was turned away from the camera. I flicked back through the images one more time, to confirm what I had seen, then laid them to one side.

In Ray Czabo’s photographs, all the doors and windows in the Grady house were clearly padlocked from the outside. There was no way that anyone could be inside.

Yet someone was.

That night Rachel complained of pains in her stomach, so I took her to Maine Medical and spent two hours in the waiting room while the doctors looked her over. I read the newspapers for a time, but they seemed to be filled with suffering and I didn’t need to read about people dying while Rachel was in pain.

Eventually, the doctors let her out. They told us that there was nothing to be concerned about, and that everything looked fine. We got home at about 2 A.M., and Rachel began crying shortly after. I couldn’t console her, and she couldn’t seem to bring herself to speak, so I held her in my arms until her crying stopped and she at last fell asleep, her final moments of wakefulness punctuated by small hiccuping sobs.

The next morning she acted as if nothing had happened, and I didn’t know what else to do except to let her be.

VII

They arrived at the Portland airport shortly after 10 A.M. Its official title was the Portland International Jetport, which had a kind of Buck Rogers ring to it, although futurism and Portland weren’t concepts that sat easily together. I kind of liked it that way.

They were getting older, I realized. We all were. True, the changes in Angel, the new pain lines in his face and the creeping gray in his previously soot-black hair, were too sudden to go u

“What?” he said.

“You’re going seriously gray,” I said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Hate to break it to you.”

“Like I said, I believe you’re mistaken.”

“You can take steps. You don’t have to just sit back and let it happen.”

“I don’t have to sit back and do nothin’, because there’s nothin’ to let happen.”

“Okay, if you say so. But you know, you let that hair grow out some and you can sign on as Morgan Freeman’s stunt double.”

“He has a point,” chipped in Angel. “Morgan ain’t as young as he used to be. Studios would probably pay good money for a younger guy who just looks as old as Morgan Freeman.”

Louis stopped at the door leading out of the terminal building.

“You going to sulk?” I asked him.

“Maybe he’s just forgotten where he’s going. That happens as you get-”

For an older man, Angel could still move pretty quickly when he wanted to, so Louis’s Cole Haan missed him by an inch.

The first time.

We sat at a table in the Bayou Kitchen, a tiny little diner over on Deering that until recently had only opened for lunch but now did weekend di

Angel was still rubbing his shin occasionally and casting hurt glances at Louis, so it was left to me to do most of the talking. I told them a little more of the history of the Grady house, and about my encounters with Chief Grass, De

“You sure Maguire’s clean?” asked Louis.

“I didn’t get anything bad from him.”

“You tell Matheson about him?”

“No.”

I had spoken with Matheson that morning. He told me that he had a key for the basement in the house, and he thought that the cops had one too, but he hadn’t realized that there was no copy on the set of keys he had given to me. He promised to get one to me by the end of the day. He also told me that he’d had a shouting match with Chief Grass after Grass had questioned the wisdom of hiring me.

“Matheson is edgy enough as it is,” I said. “The last thing I need is for him to start bothering Maguire about the past.”

“What about Czabo?”

“I’d call him a suspect, but there hasn’t been a crime. Still, the photo in the mailbox isn’t his style. He’s a watcher, not a doer.”

“And the antiques guy?”

“The Collector?” I had begun to think of him by that name. After all, I had no other. “He told me he had nothing to do with the photograph. He said he just wanted a mirror from the house, but he knows something.”

“Could be he’s a grave robber, like Voodoo Ray,” said Angel.

“Maybe if you just gave him a mirror, he’d tell you what he knows,” suggested Louis.

“I don’t think so. Anyway, nothing in the house is mine to give away.”

“You think he’s a threat?”

I put my hands up in the air.

“A threat to what? To us? We haven’t done anything. For once, we’re free and clear. Nobody hates us on this case.”

“Yet,” said Angel.

“Always happens, though,” said Louis.

“If only they took the time to get to know us a little better,” said Angel.