Damaged Goods: A Jack McMorrow Mystery Read online

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  I put the phone down. Closed the sliding door with the barrel of the gun. It looked like he—or they—had come in the side door, exited at the back. Maybe they knocked to see if anybody answered, if Mary was there again. I watched the woods for a minute, but nothing stirred, no glint of metal or flash of color.

  Turning away from the door, I went to the study and Roxanne’s desk. I opened the binder in the top drawer, flipped through until I found July, then I found her mileage log.

  Two trips to the Hatchet Mountain Road, North Appleton, a crossroads ten miles and a few light years west of ritzy Camden. I closed the binder, put it back in the drawer. Rifle in my arms, I headed for the side door. On the way by, I reached into the closet and took the rest of the shells.

  Chapter 27

  I pulled into the barnyard, slid the truck to a stop. I could hear the music—piano, Duke Ellington—and I went to the barn door and pushed it open. Clair was coming out of a storeroom with a bag of chicken feed on his shoulder. He saw me and put it down. “What?” he said.

  “He was here,” I said. “This morning, after we left.”

  “Where?”

  I told him: the doll, the knife, the blood, the call.

  “Your knife?”

  “No, he brought it with him.”

  “That’s not good,” Clair said.

  “No. Pre-meditation. He had a plan.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Go find him.”

  “Can you do that? With Roxanne and the job? I’m sure there are rules.”

  “There were,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  “Gonna talk to him?”

  “Can’t wait for the cops. Trooper Ricci is off until tomorrow. I left a message for somebody else.”

  “I’ll go, watch your back.”

  “Okay.”

  “’Cause you’ve got a daughter. You don’t want to watch her grow up from a prison visiting room.”

  “I’m just gonna talk to him,” I said. “I can’t just sit there, wait for him to do something. Next time, it might not be—” I didn’t finish the thought.

  “What are you bringing?” Clair said.

  “The Remington.”

  “I’ll bring a shotgun,” Clair said.

  “For self-defense,” I said.

  “Just in case.”

  “Because we don’t know what Satan is gonna tell him.”

  “No,” Clair said. “That’s hard to predict.”

  We drove south on Route 131. I knew Hatchet Mountain was south of the intersection and cemetery that marked North Appleton. The woods of Appleton Ridge were on our right, rugged country that dropped down to a stream and swampland. We cut to the east on 105, were almost to the town of Hope when we saw the road sign, bullet holes through the word Hatchet.

  I turned to Clair. “Think that means anything?”

  “I’ve been counting,” he said. “Passed eleven road signs, eight of them shot up.”

  “Yeah. And so far he’s been a knife and club kinda guy.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Clair said.

  “No,” I said. As I turned off, Clair started slipping shells into the shotgun.

  The road was gravel, a lane and a half, in need of ditching. There were puddles in the low spots, ruts from heavy trucks. “Somebody’s been cutting in here,” Clair said.

  I eased the truck through one deep pool, heard the water against the skid plate underneath me.

  The shotgun was loaded. Clair rested the butt on his thigh. I could feel him focus, the way he did before we did something like this. He grew calm, quiet, hyper-aware. “Roxanne say anything about the house?”

  “Dark. Home-built. A rough road in.”

  “Straight or curved?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “How far off this road?”

  “A few hundred yards.”

  “If it isn’t in sight of the house, you can drop me partway.”

  I nodded. “How long you want?”

  “Ten minutes,” Clair said.

  The road climbed, gradually at first, then more steeply. A half-mile in there was an opening cut in the spruce on the right, logs and tops rotting in the ditch. A rusty chain hung from a tree on one side of the road. There was an eyebolt screwed into a tree on the opposite side but the chain wasn’t up. The Wilton welcome mat was out.

  I slowed, peered up the road. It curved gradually and there was no house in sight. I drove for a hundred yards, veering around potholes and mud. Clair rolled his window down and raised the shotgun slightly, the butt under his arm. In the distance I saw a no-trespassing sign on a tree.

  I pulled up. “I’ll come in from the back,” he said.

  I nodded and Clair got out, glanced up the road and crossed into the woods. In a minute he was gone. He was moving through the trees but I couldn’t see him. I listened and heard only chickadees, a tufted titmouse.

  I put the truck in four-wheel-drive and eased into the ditch on the left side. I got out and slipped the rifle from the scabbard behind the seat. I laid it across the driver’s seat and stood and waited.

  Watched. Listened.

  Red squirrels chattered. A pileated woodpecker called in the distance. Mosquitoes rose from the brush and buzzed around my head. I looked up and saw a red-tailed hawk slip past. Then turkey vultures circling over the trees, a pair of ravens rising from the woods behind the house.

  Carrion.

  I watched the vultures for a minute, then looked down and saw an empty jug in the grass: coffee brandy. Was Wilton a drunk? I recalled my conversation with him in Camden, his calm certainty. How would that combine with alcohol? What would I say if I faced him again?

  Tell him I’d shoot him on sight if he came near my property. Tell him it was his only warning.

  What would Roxanne say when I told her I’d been here? Would she understand that I couldn’t sit and wait for him to harm our daughter? That I couldn’t sit on my hands while this cop played it strictly by the book?

  And then a darker thought intruded: shoot Wilton now and be done with it. I chased it away, but it was followed by another: if he fired first, we’d have no choice.

  Nine minutes gone. I got back in the truck, propped the rifle on the passenger seat. Drove out of the ditch, jounced onto the road, and eased my way along. Fifty yards in, the driveway veered left. I stopped and looked.

  The brush had been cleared and the trees were bare, as though the place had been ravaged by goats. Through the trees I saw a small, low house. It was sided with rough boards and had mismatched windows on the front. The homemade door was topped by an unshingled plywood roof. There were gardens hacked out of the woods, now ringed with broken down chicken-wire fencing and overgrown, broccoli in yellow flower showing in the grass and weeds. By the door there was an old Isuzu SUV. White with rust.

  I turned in, drove part way, and stopped. I listened. No barking. Where were the dogs Roxanne had talked about? Had the clan moved on? Who was inside?

  I drove slowly up to the house and turned the truck broadside to the door and windows. Easing out, I stood by the open driver’s door, the rifle across the seat. I waited, watching the windows.

  Leaning in, I beeped the horn. Waited. No one showed.

  I beeped again, leaned on the horn longer.

  This time I saw movement, a shadow passing the window on the right. I reached in and drew the rifle toward me.

  The door rattled. It began to open. There was a boom inside, a shotgun. I pulled the rifle out, aimed it at the door. I heard Clair shouting from inside and I ran, kicked the door open, and trained the gun on the gloom inside.

  I heard Clair call, “Jack. It’s okay. We’re all set.”

  I stepped inside, smelled the gunshot smoke. My eyes adjusted and I saw Clair crouched by someone sitting on a broken-down couch. I moved closer, saw it was a woman dressed in a long denim jumper, beat-up running shoes. Her hands were over her face, her body hea
ving with sobs. The woman from the Galway court. Cheree Wilton.

  No one was shot. There was an old single-barrel shotgun on the floor behind Clair. I looked to the back of room, saw the blast hole in the drywall.

  “She missed,” Clair said.

  “I thought it was him,” Cheree Wilton said, from behind her hands.

  “Who?” I said.

  “My husband,” she said. “I thought Harland, he’d come back.”

  She lowered her hands, showing eyes ringed in purple and yellow bruises. One of her ear lobes was bloody, like an earring had been torn out. There was a cut at her hairline, a scab that ran through her hair. The backs of her hands were scratched and gouged.

  She took a long, deep breath. “You police? What do you want?”

  “I’m Jack McMorrow,” I said. “Roxanne Masterson is my wife.”

  She blanched under the bruises, swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?” I said.

  “For what he’s doing. He’s freakin’ lost it.”

  “Who? Your husband?”

  She nodded, started to cry again.

  “It’s okay,” Clair said.

  “It’s not okay. It’s a mess. It’s the worst mess you could ever have. The kids. I’ll never get them back. But it doesn’t matter ’cause he’s gonna kill me.”

  “Nobody is going to kill you,” I said.

  “He said it. He said it’s my fault they took the kids. Why couldn’t I cook? But I couldn’t cook, there was no food. No food he’d allow in the house. He says if we don’t get them back, he’ll kill me. And he’ll kill them before he’d let them be raised by the followers of the Nazarean. That’s what he said.”

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “I don’t know. In his truck someplace, maybe. He came home last night and said, why was I just sitting here? Well, where am I supposed to go? He said he was fighting to get the kids back and I was just laying around. Called me names and punched me and punched me. Look at me.”

  She looked like someone who staggers from the wreckage after a bomb goes off. “We can call an ambulance,” Clair said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Is he coming back soon?” I said.

  “How would I know? He doesn’t tell me. It’s like I’m his servant, you know? Orders me around. If I don’t do what he says fast enough, he slaps me in the head. That’s how I got this.”

  She touched her scalp.

  “Hit me so hard it tore the skin.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “No, most of the time now he’s with his friend. His only friend. The only one left.”

  “The guy who came to my house,” I said. “Who got stuck with the knife.”

  She looked at me, seemed to almost cower. “I had to go, I had to do it. He told me if I didn’t it would show that I was one of the fallen ones and he couldn’t be responsible for my safety. My safety. Look at me.”

  “Why did you come to my house?” I said.

  She hesitated. “Like I said, it wasn’t my idea.”

  “But what was the idea?”

  Another pause. She looked at Clair, then away from both of us. “He called it a raid. He . . . he thinks that if he has your little girl, he can trade her for Jeremy and Luc.”

  “Not a good plan,” I said.

  “You can’t tell him.”

  “Who’s his buddy?”

  “His name is Carlton. Last name is Sirois or something like that. He joined the group near the end.”

  “The religion thing?” Clair said.

  “It wasn’t always like this. When we first met, Harland was so interesting. I mean, really. Like, he can tell you all about Egypt and Sumeria and the gods they worshipped and how the Catholic Church came about and all of this stuff. My first husband, he couldn’t even tell you about New Hampshire. And then I meet Harland, and it’s like he’s from a different time, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Satan and all that?” I said.

  “Which, if you think about it, it makes so much sense, right? Or it did in the beginning. We had, like, twenty people who got together to talk and you learned so much. Did you know that the original gods were made into this awful evil thing so Christians could take over and make money and get all this power? Like all those popes and cardinals and bishops, living like kings in the thirteen hundreds while everybody else starved? It’s all there, if you really do the studying. Harland could prove it, that Satan was, you know, the creator. I mean, Satan wasn’t really evil at all. And then they started making up all this stuff about him being the devil. He really isn’t.”

  “But your husband says Satan is giving him his orders.” I said.

  “Does he order him to beat you up?” Clair said, still somber.

  She sighed, shook her head. “He hears all these things now, stuff that’s only real in his head, I think. He thinks the CIA is watching him, because the Pope ordered them to.”

  “The Pope?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. I mean, when a plane flies over, I mean any plane. A big jetliner going to England or someplace, he says it’s surveillance. Either the CIA or the Vatican, or the Jews. The Jews are everywhere.”

  She wiped her eyes, touched the scab in her hair. “They hired this new girl down to the store over in Union, she’s foreign or something, and he said he knew she was brought in by the Israelis to watch him. Stopped going there. And then he started saying they were gonna try to steal the kids, raise them Christian, stop the passing of the torch. And then they did, the lady from the State—your wife, I mean—she comes and takes Jeremy and Luc and it’s like it’s all coming true. Everything Harland said.”

  “But he beat your kids,” I said.

  “He said he had to discipline them to keep them from getting too weak. If you’re weak, you’re somebody the Christians can convert. It’s what they did, like to the natives in Mexico. We studied it. Harland said we needed to know their methods.”

  “And he had to discipline you, too?” Clair said.

  She didn’t answer, just looked bone weary and defeated.

  “You should call the police. Or I can call them for you,” I said.

  “Get police out here for this,” she sighed, “and I’ll never see the kids. Now it’s way more than just me. He’s just so angry. I think the voices in his head, they’re driving him crazy. Yesterday he killed the dogs, threw them in the woods out back.”

  “The vultures,” I said.

  “He said the Jews had taken over their bodies, that the dogs were listening to us, telling the Jews what we were saying. He says it’s Satan talking to him, but I don’t think so because Satan wouldn’t be talking to him all the time. I mean, he must have something better to do.”

  We stared at her, then glanced at each other. Clair reached for her shotgun, broke it open and pulled out the spent shell.

  “He took all the rest of the guns,” she said.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Another shotgun, a double barrel. A .308 rifle. A handgun. It’s an old revolver he got at a pawnshop in Augusta. Traded the lawnmower when we got the goat, but the goat died.”

  “What about the other guy?” Clair said. “He bring anything to the party?”

  She shook her head. “Just money and a cell phone. Harland had to teach him how to shoot. Wanted to give him this shotgun but I told him it was busted.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “So when he came back, I could shoot the son of a bitch. He’s gonna kill somebody. But now I can’t. He took all the shells. I only had the one in the gun.”

  “Come with us,” I said. “We’ll get you to a shelter.”

  “Hell, no. He’s not driving me from my home.”

  Clair looked at me. I nodded. “Twelve gauge?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Clair jacked two shells from his gun, handed them to her. “Number two buckshot,” he said. “He comes back, tries to hurt you again, aim for the belt buckle. Most people miss hig
h.”

  Chapter 28

  There was a direct route home: up Route 105, hit 131 north to Searsmont, across Route 3, the main drag to the coast, and wind up Route 220 through Center Montville, Thorndike, and Prosperity.

  But I wanted to drive the road Harland Wilton would drive, skulking around the countryside with his buddy, sleeping in his truck.

  I said this to Clair and he said, “Up over Moody Mountain, down the other side and across Jam Black Brook. Tote roads in there, bogs and streams—you could hide out for years.”

  “Or at least until Satan gave you another assignment,” I said.

  “Until then,” Clair said.

  So we caught the Moody Mountain Road, six miles east of Camden and in another world. Deep woods, boulders strewn through them, the road running down into lowland covered with dense alder and swamp maple. I slowed so we could peer down the logging roads, looking for a truck stuck back in the woods, maybe, waiting for night to fall. Nothing showed.

  We drove north through Searsmont village—no truck there—and continued northward, over Thompson Ridge and up to Poland’s Corner. It was like passing through some vast cemetery, the road signs like gravestones for people long dead.

  And then we were climbing Knox Ridge, coasting down the other side, dappled swatches of forest and pasture spread out before us. It was the time when I ordinarily would feel my body relax, a delicious calm sweep over me. I was almost home and home was my refuge.

  Not this time.

  We slowed on our road, eased up to the places where a truck could pull into the woods. I drove down the path where we’d found Carlton and the Jeep, but there was no truck.

  “Doesn’t look like anybody’s been here since—”

  Clair held up one finger. I let the truck coast to a stop. He got out and walked back to a place where the brush was low, grass and wildflowers mixed in. He walked in, started picking up branches, laying them back down. They were broken off. I walked back as he held a clump of Queen Anne’s Lace to his nose, then held it up to me. I sniffed.

  “Motor oil,” I said.

  “Truck’s got a leak,” he said. “Pulled in here and dripped.”