He smiled. "Take that attitude and we might never leave."

"Don't even go there, Angel," I warned. "And pick up the check. It's the least you can do."

CHAPTER TEN

I woke early and refreshed for the trip to Bangor. Angel and Louis were still in bed, so I drove to Oak Hill, intending to stop off at the bank to withdraw some cash for the trip north. But when I had finished, I headed on down Old County Road and onto Black Point Road, past the White Caps Sandwich Shop until I reached Ferry Road. To my left was the golf course, to my right the summer homes, and ahead of me was the parking lot where the men had died. The rain had washed away the evidence, but lengths of tattered crime scene tape still fluttered on one of the barriers as the wind howled in off the sea.

As I stood, taking in the scene, a car pulled up behind me: a cruiser driven by one of the Scarborough reserve cops, probably drafted in since the killings to keep rubberneckers away.

"You okay, sir?" he asked, as he stepped from the car.

"Yeah, just looking," I replied. "I live up on Spring Street."

He sized me up, then nodded. "I recognize you now. Sorry, sir, but after what happened here, we have to be careful."

I waved a hand at him, but he seemed to be in the mood for conversation. He was young, certainly younger than I was, with straw-colored hair and soft, serious eyes. "Strange business," he said. "It's usually pretty quiet and peaceful here."

"You from around these parts?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No, sir. Flint, Michigan. Came east after GM screwed us over, and started again here. Best move I ever made."

"Yeah, well, this place hasn't always been so peaceful." My grandfather could trace his family's roots back to the mid-seventeenth century, maybe two decades after Scarborough was first settled in 1632 or 1633. Back then, the whole area was called Black Point and the settlement was abandoned twice because of attacks by the natives. In 1677, the Wabanaki had attacked the English fort at Black Point on two occasions. Forty English soldiers and a dozen of their Indian allies from the Protestant mission village at Natick, near Boston, died in the second assault alone. Maybe ten minutes by car from where we were standing was Massacre Pond, where Richard Hunnewell and nineteen others died in an Indian attack in 1713.

Now, with its summer homes and its yacht club, its bird sanctuary and its polite police, it was easy to forget that this was once a violent, troubled place. There was blood beneath the ground here, layer upon layer of it like the marks left in rock faces by seas that had ceased to exist hundreds of millions of years before. I sometimes felt that places retained memories-houses, lands, towns, mountains, all holding within themselves the ghosts of past experiences-and sometimes those places acted just like magnets, attracting bad luck and violence to them like iron filings. In other words, once a lot of blood was spilled somewhere, then there was a pretty good chance that it would be spilled there again.

It wasn't strange that eight men should have ended their lives so bloodily here. It wasn't strange at all.

When I returned to the house I toasted some English muffins, made coffee and had a quiet breakfast in the kitchen while Louis and Angel showered and dressed.

We had decided the night before that Louis would stay at the house, maybe take a look around Portland and see if he could find any signs of Abel and Stritch. Also, in the event that anything developed while we were away, he could call me on the cell phone and let me know.

Portland to Bangor is 125 miles north on I-95. As we drove, Angel flipped through my cassette tape collection impatiently, listening to something for one or two songs then discarding it on the back seat: The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, The Gourds out of Austin, Jim White, Doc Watson, they all ended up in the pile, so that the car started to look like a music business nightmare. I put on a Lampchop cassette, and the gentle, sad chords of I Will Drive Slowly filled the car.

"What'd you say this is?" asked Angel.

"Alternative country," I replied.

"That's when your truck starts, your wife comes back and your dog gets resurrected," he snickered.

"Willie Nelson heard you talking like that, he'd whip your ass."

"This the same Willie Nelson whose wife once tied him up in a bedsheet and beat him unconscious with a broom handle? That pothead comes after me, I reckon I can handle myself."

Eventually, we settled for a discussion of local news on PBS. There was some talk of a timber company surveyor who might have gone missing up north, but I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it. At Waterville, we took the off-ramp and stopped for soup and coffee. Angel toyed with saltine crumbs as we waited for the check. He had something on his mind, and it didn't take long for it to emerge.

"Remember when I asked you about Rachel, back in New York?" he said at last.

"I remember," I replied.

"You weren't too keen on talking about it."

"I'm still not."

"Maybe you should."

There was a pause. I wondered when Louis and Angel had discussed Rachel and me, and guessed that it might have come up between them more than once. I relented a little.

"She doesn't want to see me," I said.

He pursed his lips. "And how do you feel about that?"

"You going to charge me by the hour for this?"

He flicked a crumb at me. "Just answer the question."

"Not so good but, frankly, I've got other things on my mind."

Angel's eyes glanced up at me, then back down again. "Y'know, she called once, to ask how you were."

"She called you? How'd she get your number?"

"We're in the book."

"No, you're not."

"Well, then, we must have given it to her."

"You're so helpful." I sighed, and ran my hands over my face. "I don't know, Angel. The whole thing is screwed up. I don't know if I'm ready yet and, anyway, I frighten her. She's the one who pushed me away, remember?"

"You didn't need a whole lot of pushing."

The check came, and I put down a ten and some ones on top of it. "Yeah, well… I had my reasons. Just like she did."

I stood, and Angel stood with me.

"Maybe," he said. "Pity neither of you could come up with one good reason between you."

As we drove back onto I-95, Angel stretched contentedly beside me, and as he did so, the sleeve of his oversized shirt fell down to his elbow. On his arm, a scar, white and ragged, ran from the hollow curve beneath his stringy biceps to within an inch or two of his wrist. It was maybe six inches long in total and I couldn't imagine why I hadn't noticed it before but, as I thought about it, I realized it was a combination of factors: the fact that Angel rarely wore only a T-shirt or, if he did so, it was one with long sleeves; my own self-absorption while we were in Louisiana hunting the Traveling Man; and Angel's basic lack of inclination to discuss anything about past pains.

He caught me looking at the scar and reddened, but he did not try to hide it immediately. Instead, he looked at it himself and went quiet, as if recalling its making.

"You want to know?" he asked.

"You want to tell?"

"Not particularly."

"Then don't."

He didn't respond for a time, then: "It kind of concerns you, so maybe you got a right to know."

"If you tell me you've always been in love with me, I'm stopping the car and you can walk to Bangor."

Angel laughed. "You're in denial."

"You have no idea how deep."

"Anyway, you ain't that good lookin'." He touched the scar gently with the index finger of his right hand. "You been in Rikers, right?"