But he dreamed on the night that he and Harry Dixon found the girl’s scattered remains. He’d gone to bed late because he’d been thinking about the wolf. He should have believed Dixon on that first night, when he claimed to have seen an animal on the road. He should have connected the sighting with the garbage bags that had been torn apart, and Elspeth Ramsay’s missing dog, but his mind was on other matters, like a girl with a hole in her chest, and the Dixons and their tales of cloth and wood splinters, and the slow decline in the fortunes of his town that had to be arrested.
And it had been decades since a wolf was last seen in the state. The St Lawrence formed a natural barrier, keeping them in Canada, and that suited Morland just fine. He was aware that some in Maine were in favor of the reintroduction of wolves, arguing that they’d been an important part of the ecosystem until they’d been slaughtered out of existence. You could make the same argument for dinosaurs and saber-toothed cats as far as Morland was concerned, but that wasn’t a reason for trying to bring them back. What might happen to a kid who got lost in the woods, maybe separated from parents who were hiking the trails? What about an adult stumbling and breaking a leg, and suddenly finding himself surrounded by a wolf pack – what would happen then? The same thing that happened to Elspeth Ramsay’s hound, perhaps, or the same thing that happened to the girl, except at least she was dead when the wolf started to gnaw on her. The world was full of do-gooders, but it was left to men like Morland to clean up their mess.
He poured himself a finger of bourbon. Just as he rarely dreamed, so too he only occasionally consumed hard liquor. He wondered if the two might not be connected. Didn’t matter. Tonight was different. Tonight he’d gone to dig up a body and found that a wolf had done it for him, forcing him to scrabble in the dirt for bone and rotting meat and scraps of plastic and cloth. He’d seen dead bodies before – suicides, accidental shootings, traffic collisions, and the regular actions of mortality that called for the local cops to break a window or kick in a door because someone had been selfish enough to pass away without giving prior notice to his friends, relatives and neighbors. Morland had never killed anyone himself, unlike his old man, but Daniel Morland had prepared his son well for the responsibility that would eventually pass to him when he became chief of police, and Morland had been surprised at how dispassionately he’d viewed the girl’s body following the shooting. It reminded him of the sense of passing sadness he felt upon looking down at a deer felled in the course of a hunt.
He took a sip of bourbon and tried to pretend he was chief of police in a normal town. A ‘normal town’: his own words made him laugh aloud, and he covered his mouth like a child who feared being caught doing something naughty. The only thing normal about Prosperous was the way it proved that, over time, individuals could habituate themselves to the most appalling behavior. So many of the townsfolk, even the ones most closely involved in its secrets, regarded themselves as ‘good’ people, and not without reason. They looked after their families, and they abided, for the most part, by the law. Politically, Prosperous was the most liberal town in this part of Maine: Proposition 1 to allow same-sex marriage in the state had passed by as much of a majority in Prosperous as it had in Portland, and it leaned slightly Democrat or liberal independent in elections. But the older citizens of Prosperous understood that the town was built on a lie, or a truth too terrible to be named. Some of them preferred to pretend not to know, and nobody begrudged them their show of ignorance. They weren’t suited to leadership. In the end it always came down to the original families, to the founders. They looked after the town for all.
Morland finished his drink. He should have called Hayley Conyer to tell her of the wolf and the turmoil at the grave site, but he did not. He’d had his fill of Hayley. The call could wait until the morning. Tomorrow he would see about putting together a hunting party, and they’d find the wolf and kill it quietly. Thomas Souleby had an old hound that might be useful in picking up the wolf’s scent. Morland didn’t know much about hunting wolves, apart from what he’d learned that evening from Google, but opinion seemed to be divided on the usefulness of packs of dogs in a hunt. Some said that a wolf would run from them, but in Wisconsin a couple of hundred dead hunting dogs said otherwise. Elspeth Ramsay’s missing mongrel suggested that this wolf wasn’t above taking down a domestic animal if it had the chance. No matter: Prosperous wasn’t overflowing with the kind of dogs that might be useful in a confrontation with a wolf anyway, not unless he had missed a news flash about the hidden strength of labradoodles. Trapping seemed to be the most effective way to deal with the animal, but they might be lucky enough to get it under their guns first, although right now luck was in short supply.
He went to bed. He kissed his wife. She mumbled something in her sleep.
He dreamed.
In his dream, Prosperous was burning.
The headlines in the newspapers over the days that followed were all very similar: TRIPLE TRAGEDY STRIKES SMALL TOWN; MAINE TOWN MOURNS ITS DEAD; TROUBLE COMES IN THREES FOR CLOSEKNIT COMMUNITY …
In Afghanistan, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter carrying four US ‘military advisors’ and crew went down in Kandahar. Three of the men survived the crash, which was caused by a mechanical failure, but they did not survive the firefight with the Taliban that followed. In the shadowy corners of the Internet a photograph circulated of three severed heads placed in a line on the sand. Two of them were identified as Captain Mark Tabart and Staff Sergeant Jeremy Cutter, both natives of Prosperous, Maine.
On the same day that the two soldiers died, a woman named Valerie Gillson rounded a bend between Dearden and Prosperous and saw a wounded fawn lying in the middle of the road. The animal appeared to have been struck by a vehicle, for its back legs were twisted and broken. It scrabbled at the road with its front hooves and thrashed its head in agony. Valerie stepped from her car. She couldn’t leave the animal in distress, and she couldn’t run it over to put it out of its agony: she’d never be able to drive her car again. She took out her cell phone and called the police department in Prosperous. Chief Morland would know what to do. The number rang, and Marie Nesbit, who was on dispatch duty that day, picked up the call.
‘Hi, Marie? This is Valerie Gillson. Yes, I’m fine, but I’m about a mile south of town and there’s a wounded deer in the middle of the road. It’s in a lot of pain and I don’t—’
She stopped talking. She had just noticed that there was something tangled around the back legs of the deer. It looked like wire. No, not wire: roots, or thick briars – she wasn’t sure which. They extended into the undergrowth. It was almost as if the wounded deer had been placed there as bait. Instinctively she raised her phone and took a photograph of the deer’s legs.
She heard Marie’s voice asking if she was still okay.
‘Sorry, Marie, I just noticed—’
Valerie Gillson never got to tell Marie what she had seen because at that moment a logging company truck took the bend behind her just a fraction too fast. The driver swerved to avoid the car and struck Valerie instead, killing her instantly. Her cell phone was recovered in the aftermath. On it was the last photograph that Valerie had taken: the hindquarters of a deer, its legs entwined with dark roots.
But of the deer itself, there was no sign.
And in the gunsmithery at the back of his store, Ben Pearson was carrying his favorite hunting rife to the workbench. The gun was the same one that he had used to kill Annie Broyer. Chief Morland had advised him to get rid of it, and Ben knew it made sense to do as Morland said. The bullet had gone straight through the girl, and Ben hadn’t been able to find any trace of it, try as he might. The rife linked him to murder, and it didn’t matter how much time and effort he’d put into customizing it so that there wasn’t a gun to rival it for miles. It had to be taken apart and destroyed.