The Whisperers

‘That sounds reasonable.’

‘I’d like to think so. Now you can get in your fancy Lexus and drive out of here. Some of us have overtime to earn. Incidentally, I never took you for a Lexus guy. Last I heard, you were driving a Mustang, like you’re Steve McQueen.’

‘The Mustang’s in the shop,’ I lied. ‘This is a loaner.’

‘A loaner from New York? Don’t give me a reason to run those plates. Well, if you can’t find a room in Rangeley, you can just sleep in that car. It’s big enough. Drive safely now.’

I headed back to Rangeley and sought out a room at the Rangeley I

I walked over to Sarge’s pub to get something to eat. It wasn’t a hard choice, since it was the only place nearby that seemed to be open. Sarge’s had a long, curving bar with five TVs showing four different sports and, in the case of the final screen behind the bar, a local news show. The volume on the sports screens had been turned down, and a group of men was watching the news in silence. Proctor’s death had made the lead, as much for the oddness of his passing as for the fact that it was a slow news night. Suicides didn’t usually merit that kind of coverage, and the local news stations generally tended to be pretty sensitive to the feelings of the relatives of the deceased, but some of the details of Proctor’s death had clearly caught their attention: a man sealed up from the inside in a room of a disused motel, his life ended by an apparently self-inflicted wound. The report didn’t mention the shots that he had fired at someone outside the room before he killed himself.

I heard muttered words as I took a seat away from the bar, and a couple of heads turned in my direction. One of them belonged to Stunden, the taxidermist. I ordered a burger and a glass of wine from the waitress. The wine arrived quickly, closely followed by Stunden. I cursed myself quietly. I had forgotten all about my earlier promise to him. The least I had owed him, both for the information he had provided and because of his concern for Harold Proctor, was a personal visit, and some clarification of what had occurred.

Those who had stayed in their seats were all looking in my direction. Stunden smiled apologetically, and shot a quick look at the men behind him, as if to say, well, you know how small towns are. To their credit, those at the bar were clearly trying to balance embarrassment with curiosity, but curiosity was ahead by a neck.

‘Sorry to bother you, Mr. Parker, but we hear that it was you who found Harold.’

I gestured to the seat across from me, and he sat. ‘There’s no apology necessary, Mr. Stunden. I should have paid a courtesy call to you after the police let me go, but it had been a long day, and I forgot. I’m sorry for that.’

Stunden’s eyes looked red. He’d been drinking some, but I thought that he might also have been crying.

‘I understand. It was a shock for all of us. I couldn’t open the bar, not after what happened. That’s why I’m here. I thought somebody might know more than I did, and then you came in, and, well…’

‘I can’t tell you much,’ I said, and he was smart enough to pick up on the dual meaning of the words.

‘If you’d just tell me what you can, that would be enough. Is what they’re saying about him true?’

‘Is what who’s saying true?’

Stunden shrugged. ‘The TV people. Nobody here has heard anything official from the detectives. Closest thing we have is the border patrol. The story is that Harold committed suicide.’

‘It looks that way.’

If there had been a cap in Stunden’s hand, he would have twisted it awkwardly.

‘One of the border cops told Ben here-’ He jerked a thumb at an overweight man in a camo shirt, his belt so weighted with keys, knives, phones, and flashlights that his pants were almost around his thighs. ‘-that there was something hinky about Harold’s death, but he wouldn’t say what it was.’

There was that word again: hinky. Joel Tobias was hinky. Harold Proctor’s death was hinky. It was all hinky.

Ben, and two other men from the bar, drawn by the prospect of some enlightenment, had gravitated toward us. I weighed up my options before I spoke, and saw that there was no benefit to me in holding anything back from them. Everything would emerge eventually, if not later tonight when some off-duty border cop came in for a drink, then tomorrow at the latest when the town’s own information-gathering resources began to kick into gear. But I also knew that while there might be aspects of Harold Proctor’s death about which they did not know, then equally there would be parts of his life about which I had no knowledge, and they did. Stunden had been helpful. Some of these men might be helpful too.

‘He fired all the bullets in his gun before he died,’ I said. ‘He saved the last one for himself.’

Everyone probably came up with the same question at the same time, but it was Stunden who asked it first.

‘What was he firing at?’

‘Something outside,’ I said, again pushing to the back of my mind the spread of the bullet holes in the room.

‘You think he was chased in there?’ asked Proctor.

‘Hard to see how a man being chased would have time to nail himself up in a room,’ I replied.

‘Hell, Harold was crazy,’ said Ben. ‘He never was the same after he came back from Iraq.’

There were general nods of agreement. If they had their way, it would be carved on his headstone. ‘Harold Proctor. Somewhat Missed. Was Crazy.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you now know as much as I do.’

They began to drift away. Only Stunden remained. He was the only one of the men who appeared genuinely distressed at the circumstances of Harold’s death.

‘You OK?’ I asked him.

‘No, not really. I guess I wasn’t as close to Harold in recent times as I once was, but I was still his friend. It troubles me to think of him being so…’

He couldn’t find the word.

‘Frightened?’ I said.

‘Yeah, frightened, and alone. To die that way, I mean, it just doesn’t seem right.’

The waitress came by with my burger, and I ordered myself another glass of wine, even though I’d barely touched the glass before me. I pointed at Stunden’s glass.

‘Bushmills,’ he said. ‘No water. Thanks.’

I waited until the drinks appeared, and the waitress was gone. Stunden took a long sip of his drink as I ate my food.

‘And I suppose I feel guilty,’ he said. ‘Does that make sense? I feel like, had I done more to stay in touch with him, to bring him out of his shell, to ask him about his problems, then none of this would have happened.’

I could have lied to him. I could have said that Proctor’s death had nothing to do with him, that Proctor had been set on a different path, a path that led ultimately to a lonely, terrified death in a sealed room, but I didn’t. It would have belittled the man before me, a man who was decent and honorable.

‘I can’t say if that’s true or not,’ I told him. ‘But Harold got himself involved in something odd, and that wasn’t your fault. In the end, that’s probably what got him killed.’