"It was an old fella from up north," he sighed. "He comes in here maybe once a month, brings stuff that he's found. Most of it's junk, but I give him a few bucks for it and he goes away again. Sometimes, he brings in something good."

"He bring these in recently?"

"Yesterday. I gave him thirty bucks for 'em. Brought in a backpack too, Lowe Alpine. I sold it straight off. That was about it. He didn't have nothin' else to offer."

"This old guy from up Dark Hollow way?"

"Yeah, that's right, Dark Hollow."

"You got a name?"

His eyes narrowed again. "Just tell me, mister, what are you: some kind of private cop?"

"Like I said, I'm just a guy."

"You got a lot of questions for someone who's just a guy." I could sense Stuckey digging his heels in again.

"I'm naturally curious," I said, but I showed him my ID anyway. "The name?"

"Barley. John Barley."

"That his real name?"

"The hell do I know?"

"He show you any identification?"

Stuckey almost laughed. "You seen him, you'd know he wasn't the kind of fella carries no ID."

I nodded once, took out my wallet and counted six ten-dollar bills onto the counter. "I'll need a receipt," I said. Stuckey filled one out quickly in sloped capitals, stamped it, then paused before handing it to me.

"Like I told you, I don't want no trouble," he said.

"If you've told me the truth, there won't be any."

He folded the receipt once and put it in a plastic bag with the boots. "I hope you won't take this personal, mister, but I reckon you make friends 'bout as easy as a scorpion."

I took the bag and put my wallet back in my coat. "Why?" I asked. "You sell friendship here too?"

"No, mister, I sure don't," he said, and there was a finality in his tone. "But I don't reckon you'd be buying any even if I did."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was already dark when I began the journey back to Dark Hollow. Snow was drifting across the road to Beaver Cove and beyond, where the narrow, winding, tree-lined road led to the Hollow. The snow seemed to glow in the headlights, small golden fragments of light tumbling down, as if heaven itself was disintegrating and falling to earth. I tried to call Angel and Louis on the cell phone, but it was a useless effort. As it turned out, they were already at the motel when I got back. Louis answered the door dressed in black pants with a razor-sharp crease and a cream-colored shirt. I could never figure out how Louis kept his clothes so neat. I had shirts that had more creases than Louis's while they were still in the box.

"Angel's in the shower," he said, as I stepped past him into their room. On the television screen, a reporter mouthed silently before the White House lawn.

"What's seldom is wonderful."

"Amen to that. If it was summer, he'd be attracting flies."

It wasn't true, of course. Angel may have looked like someone who was barely on nodding terms with soap and hot water, but he was, all things considered, remarkably clean. He just looked more crumpled than most people. In fact, he looked more crumpled than just about anyone I knew.

"Any movement over at the Payne place?"

"Nothing. The old man came out, went back in again. The boy came out, went back in again. After the fourth or fifth time, the novelty started to wear off. No sign of Billy Purdue, though, or anyone else."

"You think they knew you were out there?"

"Maybe. Didn't act like it, which could go either way. You got anything?"

I showed him the boots and told him of my conversation with Stuckey. Angel came out of the shower at that moment, wrapped in four towels.

"Shit, Angel," said Louis. "The fuck are you, Mahatma Gandhi? What you use all the towels for?"

"It's cold," he whined. "And I got marks on my ass from that car seat."

"You gonna get marks on your ass from the toe of my shoe, you don't get me some towels. You just dry your scrawny white ass and haul it down to the desk, ask the lady for more towels. And you better make damn sure they soft, Angel. I ain't rubbin' my back with no sandpaper."

While Angel dried himself and dressed, muttering softly as he did so, I told them in detail about my encounters with Rachel, Sheriff Tannen and Erica Schneider, and what I had learned of Billy Purdue's visit to St. Martha's.

"Seems like we accumulatin' a whole lot of information, but we don't know what it means," remarked Louis, when I was done.

"We know what some of it means," I said.

"You think this guy Caleb really exists?" he asked.

"He was real enough to kill his mother, and maybe another local girl the best part of two decades later. Plus, those girls who died in '65 weren't killed by a mentally handicapped man. The display of the bodies was a lot of things-a gesture of contempt, a means to shock-but it was also an attempt at an act of madness. I think it was designed to make people think that only a madman could have done it, and the planting of an item of clothing at Fletcher's house gave them the madman they were looking for."

"So where did he go?"

I sat down heavily on one of the beds. "I don't know," I said, "but I think he went north, into the wilderness."

"And why didn't he kill again?" added Angel.

"I don't know that either. Maybe he did, and we just never found them." I knew that hikers had been murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and I'd heard that others had gone missing and never been found. I wondered if, somehow, they might have left the trail, hoping for a shortcut, and encountered something much worse than they had ever imagined.

"Or it could be he was killing before he ever arrived in Maine, but nobody ever traced the deaths back to him," I continued. "Rachel thought that he might have entered a period of dormancy, but recent events may have conspired to change that."

Angel took one of the Zamberlans and held it in his hands. "Well, we know what this means, assuming these once belonged to Ellen Cole's boyfriend." He looked at me, and there was a sadness in his eyes. I didn't want to answer him, or to acknowledge the possibility that if Ricky was dead, then Ellen could be dead too.

"Any sign of Stritch?" I asked.

Louis bristled. "I can almost smell him," he said. "The woman at the desk is still pretty cut up about her cat, no pun intended. Cops are blaming it on kids."

"What now?" said Angel.

"I go see John Barley," I replied, the obvious falsity of the name grating even as I said it, but Louis shook his head.

"That's a bad idea, Bird," he said. "It's dark, and he knows the woods better than you do. You could lose him, and any way of finding out how he came by these boots. Plus, there's his damn dog: it'll warn the old man, and then he'll start shooting, and could be you'll have to shoot back. He's no good to us dead."

He was right, of course, but it didn't make me feel any better. "At dawn, then," I said, but reluctantly. Unspoken between us was the possibility that I had already encountered Caleb Kyle, and had turned away from him because he had threatened me with a gun.

"Dawn," Louis agreed.

I left them and went back to my own room, where I dialed Walter and Lee Cole's house in Queens. Lee picked up on the third ring, and in her voice was that mixture of hope and fear that I had heard in the voices of hundreds of parents, friends and relatives, all waiting for word of a missing person.

"Lee, it's me."

She said nothing for a moment but I could hear her footsteps, as if she was moving the phone out of earshot of someone. I guessed it was Lauren. "Have you found her?"

"No. We're in Dark Hollow, and we're looking, but there's nothing yet." I didn't tell her about Ricky's boots. If I was wrong about what might have happened to him, or mistaken about the ownership of the boots, it would only be worrying her unnecessarily. If I was right, then we would know the rest soon enough.