Dark Hollow

His wife was a fearsome woman named Doreen, who wore her makeup so thick that you could have carved your initials into her face without drawing blood. When she smiled, which wasn't too often, it was as if someone had just stripped a section of peel from an orange. Ellis seemed to tolerate her the way saints tolerated their martyrdom, although I guessed that, deep down, really deep down, he still didn't like her very much.

I stood aside to let him enter the house. I didn't have a whole lot of choice. "Looking good, Ellis," I said. "The all-fat diet is really paying dividends."

"I see you got someone to fix your roof," he replied. "Know you were from the city, only man in the durned state doing roofing in the winter. Do any of it yourself?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"Jesus, maybe we'd be safer talking outside."

"Fu

I poured him some coffee. He sipped it and I noticed that his face had grown serious, almost sad.

"Something wrong?"

He nodded. "Very. You know Billy Purdue?"

I guessed that he knew the answer to that question already. I fingered the scar on my cheek. I could feel the edges of the stitches beneath my finger.

"Yeah, I know him."

"Heard you had a run-in with him a few days back. He say anything to you about his ex-wife?"

"Why?" I wasn't about to get Billy into trouble u

"Because Rita and her child turned up dead this morning in her apartment. No sign of forced entry and no one heard a thing."

I breathed out deeply and felt a sharp pang of sorrow as I recalled Donald's hand on my finger, as I remembered the touch of his mother's palm on my cheek. A burning anger at Billy Purdue coursed through my system as I briefly, instinctively, assumed his guilt. The feeling didn't last long but the intensity of it remained with me. I thought: why couldn't he have stood by them? Why couldn't he have been there for them? Maybe I didn't have the right to ask those questions; or maybe, given all that had happened in the last year, nobody else had a greater right.

"What happened to them?"

Ellis leaned forward and rubbed his hands together with a soft, rustling sound.

"From what I hear, the woman was strangled. The boy, I don't know. No obvious signs of sexual assault on either."

"You haven't been at the apartment?"

"No. This was supposed to be my day off, but I'm on my way now, what with Kramer being sick and all. The ME's already on the scene. Unlucky for him, he was in Portland for a wedding."

I stood up and walked to the window. Outside, the wind brushed the evergreens and a pair of black-capped chickadees flew high into the sky.

"You think Billy Purdue killed his own child and his ex-wife?" I said.

"Maybe. He wouldn't be the first to do something like it. She called us three nights ago, said he was hanging around outside, shouting, roaring drunk, demanding to be let in to see her. We sent a car and took him in, let him cool off for a time, then told him to keep away from her or we'd lock him up. Could be he decided that he wasn't going to let her leave him, whatever it took."

I shook my head. "Billy wouldn't do that." But I had some doubts, even as I said it. I recalled that red glare in his eyes, the way that he had almost choked the life from me in his trailer, and Rita's belief that he would do anything to stop her from taking his son away from him.

Ellis was keeping pace with my thoughts. "Maybe, maybe not," he said. "That's a nice scar you got on your cheek. You want to tell me how you came by it?"

"I went to his trailer to try to get some child-support money. He threatened to take a baseball bat to me, I tried to stop him and things got a little out of hand."

"Did she hire you to get her money?"

"I did it as a favor."

Ellis turned his mouth down at the corners. "A favor," he repeated, nodding to himself. "And when you were doing this… favor, did he say anything to you about his ex-wife?" There was an edge to Ellis's voice now.

"He said he wanted to look out for her, for them both. Then he asked me if I was sleeping with her."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him no."

"Probably the right answer, under the circumstances. Were you sleeping with her?"

"No," I said, and looked hard at him. "No, I wasn't. You pick up Billy yet?"

"He's gone. No sign of him at the trailer and Ronald Straydeer hasn't seen him since day before yesterday."

"I know. I was out there last night."

Ellis arched an eyebrow. "Want to tell me why?"

I told him about my encounter with the white-faced freak at the i

I went to the sink unit and handed him the plastic bag with the clown toy in it. "Someone came into the house last night when I was sleeping. He took a look around, watched me for a time, then left this."

I opened the bag and placed it on the table in front of Ellis. He took an evidence glove from his pocket, then reached in and touched the toy clown gently.

"I think you'll find that it's Donald Purdue's."

"Did you handle it?"

"Not directly."

He nodded. "We'll check it, run anything we find through AFIS." AFIS was the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. If that didn't yield anything, any prints would be submitted to the FBI for further analysis.

Ellis looked at me and paused before he asked the next question. "And where were you last night?"

"Jesus, Ellis, don't ask me that." I could feel a huge surge of anger welling up inside me. "Don't even imply that."

"Take it easy. Don't cry before you're hurt. You know I have to ask. May as well get it done now as have to go through it later."

He waited.

"I was here during the afternoon," I said through gritted teeth. "I went into Portland yesterday evening, worked out, bought some books, had a coffee, dropped by Rita's apartment…"

"What time?"

I thought for a moment. "Eight. Eight-thirty at the latest. There was no reply."

"And then?"

"I headed out to Ronald Straydeer's place, came back here, read, went to bed."

"When did you find the toy?"

"Maybe 3 A.M. You might want to get someone down here to take molds of the boot prints outside my house. The frost will have held the marks in the mud."

He nodded. "We'll do that." He stood to leave, then stopped. "I had to ask. You know that."

"I know."

"And here's something else: the presence of this-" He raised the bag containing the clown. "-means someone has marked you out. Someone's drawn a line between you and Rita Ferris, and it seems to me that there's only one likely candidate."

Billy Purdue. Still, it just didn't sit right, unless Billy had decided that I was to blame for the events leading up to the death of his son; that, by my actions in helping Rita, I had forced him to act as he did.

"Look, let me go with you to the apartment, see if there's anything about it that strikes a chord," I said, at last.

Ellis leaned against the door frame and considered what I had said for a moment, until at last he seemed to reach a decision. "Just don't touch anything and, if anyone asks, you're assisting us in our investigation," he said, then added: "I hear you applied to Augusta for a PI license."

That was true. I still had some cash left from Susan's insurance policy and the sale of our home, and from some work I had undertaken in New York, but I figured that sooner or later I'd have to make a living somehow. I'd already been offered some work in "corporate competitive intelligence," a euphemism for tackling industrial espionage. It sounded more interesting than it was: a sales rep suspected of selling a competitor's goods in violation of a noncompetition agreement; sabotage of a production line in a software factory in South Portland; and the leaking of information on bids for a new public housing development in Augusta. I was still debating whether or not to take on any of them.