Authors: John Connolly
He stepped inside St John’s, blessed himself, and took a seat halfway up the aisle. It was empty, and he was alone. St John’s was not an austere environment, not with its onyx, bronze, and marble, its ornately decorated walls and ceilings, its sculpted Stations of the Cross. No, this was an architectural hymn to God.
He asked himself what he was expecting: to feel the immanence of the Divine, to be bathed in His radiance? He had no answer, and no one to whom he could turn to speak aloud his thoughts. He had no father, no mother. Behind him stretched only a column of the dead.
Parker closed his eyes, and in his mind he was once again seated by a lake, but this time his dead daughter was not with him, and from the distant hills a wolf howled, registering his presence once again in that place. While he sat in St John’s, his mind recreated a world beyond this one, and he tried to connect the two environments. He was not mad, and neither were his memories the products of trauma, anesthetic, or postoperative medication. He believed that he had, however briefly, and while either dead or dying, found himself stranded between realms. He knew this because of what he kept in a pocket of his jacket. He reached for it now, his eyes still closed, and felt it between his fingers. He removed it and held it in the palm of his right hand, his thumb following its textures and striations.
It was a single black stone, damaged on one side. He had held just such a stone when he sat on the bench by the lake, trying to choose whether to embrace physical dissolution or return to the agony of existence, and when he finally threw it, the in-between world had shattered. The stone had been there with him when his dead daughter held his hand, the warmth of her like a brand against the chill of his own skin, for in that place she was restored to light, and he was the faded one. And he was clutching it in his fist when he returned to consciousness in the hospital in Portland, and no one could tell him how it had come to be there.
It was his proof, and his alone.
He opened his eyes. The church remained empty. He still had questions, but no doubts. His thumb continued to brush the stone as he prayed for Sam and Rachel, and for those whom he loved. Finally, he offered up a prayer for Amanda Winter and her mother, although he could not have said why, beyond his knowledge of the daughter’s illness, and a feeling of disquiet about the mother. When he was done, he placed the stone back in his pocket, knelt, blessed himself once again, and left.
His pain had dulled. The brief respite had done him some good.
The handover of Sam was brusque, like the delivery of a hostage, although he could see that Rachel was worried about him, and she found a moment to ask if he was sure that he would be okay with Sam (and unspoken, and more to the point, that Sam would be okay with him). He assured her they’d both be fine. He even managed to ask after Jeff, Rachel’s boyfriend, without retching. Rachel spotted the effort that it required.
‘You almost sounded sincere there,’ she said.
‘I am sincere,’ he replied. ‘I think.’
He didn’t wish Jeff ill. Jeff was an asshole, but there was a lot of that around, and if he condemned everyone who was sometimes an asshole then the prisons would be full and the streets empty. In fact, Parker was pretty certain that, in such a brave new world, he’d have a cell all to himself.
He and Sam waited for Rachel to drive away, then Sam got in the front seat of the Mustang beside her father.
‘You know your mom likes you to ride in back,’ said Parker.
‘I know. You’re going to let me ride up front, though. With you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
And, figuring that the issue had been dealt with, he pulled away from the curb.
The detective’s relationship with his daughter was a construct of great complexity, of nuance and shadow. He could never see as much of her as he might have wished, and yet curiously he did not miss her as deeply as he might have done under other circumstances, for she was always with him. In that, he thought, she was like his first daughter, his dead daughter. He carried Sam in his heart, and when he conversed with her in her absence – alone at night, or when driving along I-95 with the music down low – he heard her responses as assuredly as if she were seated next to him.
And while there was much about Sam that he did not know – and this was both a consequence of the physical distance between them and the natural gap in comprehension between a father and a growing daughter – he also felt that he understood her in ways that her mother did not. The workings of Sam’s mind somtimes baffled Rachel, but not Parker. Sam was a child of the unsaid, and perhaps because they were away from each other for such long stretches, he had learned to read the spaces, the gaps, and the silences; to listen to what was unspoken as much as to what was offered aloud. She said nothing without thinking about it first, which meant trying to trace the thought processes that had led to whatever pronouncement finally emerged. He regarded her as strangely fearless, and even her concerns for his health were tempered by an apparent conviction that all would be well, in part because she willed it to be so.
She was older than her years – Rachel, too, saw that – but this did not manifest itself as a self-aggrandizing precociousness. She simply came across as unusually self-possessed, gifted with stillness, quiet, and the ability to watch and absorb without involving herself. But, when she chose, she could inhabit the role of a child, even if Parker always felt that she was often playing to the gallery when she did so. On the drive back to Boreas, though, she was unselfconsciously herself – or herself as a six year old – entertaining him with a stream of observations, questions, and non sequiturs that took in everything from the height of fencing in relation to cows to how badly everyone must have smelled at the end of the first installment of
The Hunger Games
, which she had watched on Netflix with a babysitter, and of which she had subsequently denied all knowledge to her mother in order to protect the guilty.
They stopped along the way to buy supplies, and it was dark by the time they reached the house. Sam liked preparing pizza, so they made and rolled their own dough, divided each pizza into four sections, and experimented with toppings. They ate outside, wrapped up warm against the sea breeze, the whiteness of the breaking waves like hope made manifest in darkness, the sound and movement of them like that of living creatures. Later Sam fell asleep on the couch while her father read and listened to music. He carried her up to the room that he had set aside for her use and carefully undressed her, although she remained lost to the world throughout. He left a light on by the door, and another in the hall, in case she needed to use the bathroom during the night.
Then he went to his own bed, and slept more soundly than he had in months.
25
T
he wind died. The night was still. The breaking of the waves was a distant thing now, and in their retreat they sounded a whisper of warning.
In the darkness, Sam awoke. The dead daughter stood at the end of her bed. Sam rose on her elbows. She looked at the being in the shadows and yawned. She had been dreaming. It was a good dream.
‘You don’t have to stay,’ she told the dead daughter. ‘I’m here now. I’ll keep him safe.’
She fell back on her pillow and was instantly asleep again.
The dead daughter turned away, and was gone.
26
S
teiger had lunch in a secluded corner booth of an all-you-can-eat buffet. He liked buffet restaurants because their clientele allowed him to blend in easily, especially at lunch and dinner when there was a high turnover on the tables. With his straw hat pressed low on his forehead he could almost pass for normal, and few other customers ever gave him a second look in these places, so focused were they on the plates before them. As for the food, well, Steiger didn’t really care. He suffered from a number of ailments and impairments, including both hyposmia and hypogeusia – decreased abilities to smell and taste. Only very rich and spicy dishes impacted on his senses, but he couldn’t eat them due to his delicate guts. Food for Steiger was purely functional. It was necessary fuel, and he consumed it without either joy or displeasure.
Now he sat with his back to the wall, a cup of lousy coffee growing cold before him. The check had been brought to his table, but he wasn’t ready to leave yet. The noise of the restaurant and the ugliness of its décor allowed him to retreat into himself. It gave him space to think.
He now knew the identity of the man living next to Ruth Winter, and Steiger was troubled by his presence there. His instructions were to observe but not to intervene, not yet, but this man Parker was potentially dangerous. Who knew what the Winter woman might be sharing with him? Nevertheless, Steiger’s attempts to convince the one Amanda Winter knew as the Jigsaw Man of the risks involved in leaving Parker alive had proved fruitless. He was too busy playing his games with the police. Dead families, burning houses: Steiger would have counseled against all of it, had he been asked, but the Jigsaw Man was both client and accomplice, which made Steiger a compromised employee. Steiger also knew that the Jigsaw Man was deliberately freezing him out, making abundantly clear his continued unhappiness with what had been done to the Tedesco woman down in Florida.
Someone nudged Steiger’s table in passing, causing his coffee to slop into his saucer and splash on the Formica. Steiger reacted with a jerk of his head, and briefly stared into the face of a middle-aged man carrying a plate of salad. Their eyes met, and the other man quickly looked away. Gazing into Steiger’s eyes was like peering into a pair of sump ponds. Still, Steiger was more amused than annoyed. Who came into a buffet restaurant and ate the salad? Any nutritional value had probably been scoured from the leaves and raw vegetables anyway. They had the artificial regularity of decorative plastic.
Steiger returned to the problem of Parker. The private detective was recovering from grievous injuries, but he remained the kind of individual who was driven to act on behalf of others. If Ruth Winter revealed to him the truth behind her retreat to Boreas, then Steiger was certain that Parker would take action. To do otherwise would make him complicit in a greater evil. So if Winter talked, Parker would become a threat.
But would she talk? The appearance of the body on the beach had been both fortunate and unfortunate: unfortunate in that it would have been better had Perlman not surfaced at all, but fortunate in that it had provided an opportunity for the Jigsaw Man to warn Ruth Winter of the importance of remaining silent, for her daughter’s sake as much as her own. Winter was now well and truly frightened, of that Steiger had no doubt, yet the current situation could not persist. The central issue – Winter’s daughter, Amanda – had not been resolved, which meant that, ultimately, either the mother would act, which would present enormous difficulties, or someone would be forced to move against her before that happened.
Thus Steiger’s personal view was that it would be best for all concerned if Ruth Winter ceased to exist. The detective was another matter. If the opportunity presented itself, and it could be achieved without further complication, then Steiger would kill him too, regardless of what the Jigsaw Man wanted. It would be easiest, though, if Ruth Winter died before she had the opportunity to share anything significant with Parker. But this was not a move that Steiger could make without the consent of others.
He called from a phone booth by the men’s room. He was going over the Jigsaw Man’s head, but in his way the Jigsaw Man, too, was an employee. Steiger detected hardly a moment’s hesitation before the voice on the other end of the line told him to do whatever he deemed necessary. But Ruth Winter was not to suffer. That was made clear to him. There was to be no repeat of the business in Florida.
On his way through the restaurant he passed the man who had jostled his table. Either he had piled high another plate with salad, or had not made much progress on the original portion, because it was largely untouched.
Steiger stopped at the table. The man looked up, his fork poised midway between his mouth and the plate. Steiger decided to spare him the effort of consuming any more of the salad. He leaned over, and spat heavily on the lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. His sputum, he noticed, bore worm-twists of blood.
‘You ought to have apologized for spilling my coffee,’ he said.
He didn’t wait for the man’s reaction. He knew what it would be: none at all. He could see it in his face. Steiger was aware that he exuded an essence potent and vile from his pores, like the poisons secreted by certain amphibians to discourage predators, except that he had yet to encounter any threat worse than himself.
He walked to his car. The sun shone with growing warmth on the parking lot. Steiger’s guts hurt. They always hurt after food. Steiger knew that he was dying. He didn’t need a doctor to tell him, and he wasn’t about to submit his body to more suffering through needles and therapies. When the pain became too much to bear, he would end it all himself. For now, he could go on.
He opened the glove compartment, removed a fresh bottle of Mylanta, and drank half of it down. He still had a couple of Vicodin and Percocet in there as well, but he wanted to keep a clear head. The Mylanta helped some, although he suspected that the effects might be psychosomatic as much as actual. He thought back to the man who had struck his table. He should simply have let him be. There was no percentage in threatening him that way, just as there had been no point in making the Tedesco woman suffer so much. Perhaps, thought Steiger, he was simply growing ornery in his old age, or maybe one way to dull one’s pain was to inflict it on another. Whatever. Like the Mylanta, it seemed to work, and that was enough for him.
He started the car and headed back to Boreas.
27
P
arker took Sam to Olesens for a late brunch, where Larraine made a fuss over her and Greg produced a pile of used children’s books from some box in the basement, only a few of which Sam had read and all of which she was happy to accept as gifts, once it became clear that Greg didn’t want money for them. Another thing Parker had noticed about his daughter, and which amused him, was that she was careful with money. She wasn’t stingy – she would happily insist on buying ice-cream or treats, and liked the sense of perceived authority that came with paying for other people’s pleasures – but she was acutely conscious of value. She wouldn’t have bought the book for herself, and was too young to feel obligated to pay for something that she didn’t want, but free was free.