He placed a cell phone on the kitchen table and slid it carefully to the end nearest Zilla. He lowered his gun. Angel did the same. Zilla Daund approached the table. She picked up the phone. There was one name on the display: Kerr, her younger boy.

She called his number. He answered.

‘Kerr?’ she said.

‘Mom? Mom?’

‘Kerr, are you okay?’

‘I don’t know where I am, Mom. I got jumped by some men, and they’ve been driving me around for hours. Mom, I’m scared. What’s happening?’

‘You’re going to be fine, honey. It’s a big mistake. Those men are about to let you go. I love you.’

‘Mom? What—’

Zilla Daund killed the connection. She placed the knife back in its block. She bit her lower lip and shook her head. Her eyes were elsewhere. A tear trickled down one cheek, but whether it was for her son, her husband, or herself could not be known.

‘Your word?’ she said.

‘He’ll be released unharmed,’ said Angel.

He didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all. Threatening kids was not in his nature. It was necessary, but that didn’t make it right.

‘How can I trust you?’ said Zilla Daund.

‘Without overstating the obvious,’ said Louis, ‘you don’t have much choice. But I figure Cambion told you enough about us, and you’ve maybe learned a little more in the meantime.’

‘We made some calls,’ she admitted.

‘And?’

‘If we’d known about you, we’d have killed you before we went after the detective.’

‘Ambitious.’

‘And careful.’

‘No. If you were careful, you’d have done your homework first.’

Zilla Daund conceded the point.

‘Who told you to kill the detective?’ said Louis.

‘Hayley Conyer.’

‘Who’s Hayley Conyer?’

‘The chief selectman of the town of Prosperous, Maine.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t ask, but everything Hayley does is for the good of the town.’

‘You kill for anyone else?’

‘No, just her.’

‘For money?’

‘She pays, but we’d have helped her for nothing if we had to. We’re of the town from generations past.’

‘Who else knew?’

‘Morland, the chief of police. Pastor Warraner. The rest of the board of selectmen.’

‘Did you kill a homeless man named Jude in Portland and make it look like suicide?’

‘Yes.’

‘And his daughter?’

‘No.’

‘What’s so special about Prosperous?’ asked Angel.

Zilla Daund’s mouth settled into the odd grimace of determination that Louis had identified back at the bookstore, her teeth gritted, her lips slightly parted.

‘That’s all you get,’ she said.

‘You sold out your town pretty easily,’ said Louis.

‘I didn’t sell it out at all,’ said Zilla Daund. ‘Prosperous will eat you alive.’

Louis shot her twice. She shuddered on the kitchen floor for a time before she died. Louis walked to the front window of the house and looked out. It was already getting dark. The houses in this modern dormitory community all sat on large lots divided by hedges and trees. Lights burned in some of the homes, but there was nobody on the streets. Louis wondered how anyone could live in a development like this, with its near-identical houses on clearly delineated lots, the tiny differences in detail or aspect designed to give a false impression of individuality. Maybe killing people was the only way the Daunds could keep from going crazy.

Given more time, they would have searched the house, but Angel was uneasy. From his jacket pocket he produced two flasks of carbolic acid, or liquefied phenol. He and Louis retraced their steps through the house, spraying the carbolic acid as they went. Phenol was a useful contaminant of DNA samples. Once they were done, they left the house and returned to their cars. Each had a false adhesive number plate attached to the original. They took only seconds to remove, and melted in open fame. Louis made the call to Kerr Daund’s captors, but they were instructed not to release him until the following morning, by which time Angel and Louis would be far away from Asheville, North Carolina but considerably closer to Prosperous, Maine.

52

They did not immediately descend on Prosperous. Instead Louis and Angel waited, and they planned.

An apartment on Eastern Promenade in Portland was rented in the name of one of Louis’s shelf companies. At the Great Lost Bear, Dave Evans turned a blind eye as a succession of meetings took place in his office, until eventually he resigned himself to doing his paperwork in a booth by the bar. Prosperous was visited by a pair of Japanese businessmen and their wives, who endeared themselves to everyone they met with their courtesy and enthusiasm. They took a lot of photographs, but then that was to be expected of tourists from the Far East. They even accepted it in good spirits when they were prevented from entering the cemetery that surrounded the old church. The ground was unsafe, they were told, but plans were being put in place to mark a route through the gravestones to the chapel itself. Perhaps next time, if they returned.

And one evening, shortly after Angel and Louis’s arrival in Portland, Ronald Straydeer came to the Great Lost Bear. Ronald had rarely frequented the city’s bars when he did drink, and now that he had given up he had no cause to visit them at all, but Angel and Louis preferred to conduct their business away from their apartment, for the fewer people who knew about it, the better. The meeting with Ronald had been arranged through Rachel Wolfe, as Ronald did not know of any other way to contact the two men whom he sought. He had left a message for her at the hospital where the detective still lay in his coma. Ronald’s short note requested simply that Rachel call him. Rachel had met Ronald on a couple of occasions while she was still living in Scarborough, so she knew who he was, and was aware of the mutual respect that existed between him and her former lover. She asked no questions when he told her that he wanted to be put in touch with Angel and Louis, but simply passed the message on to them. When Angel eventually called, Ronald had said only this: ‘I saw something happen in Prosperous, something bad.’

And Angel knew that they were about to be handed another piece of the puzzle.

Over coffee in the back office, Ronald told Angel and Louis of what he had witnessed: a girl swallowed by the earth in the shadow of an old church while a group of older men and women, accompanied by a pastor and a policeman, stood by and watched. If the two men were surprised by his tale, they did not show it. If they were skeptical, Ronald could detect no trace.

‘What do you think happened to her?’ said Louis.

‘I think something pulled her underground,’ said Ronald.

‘Something?’ said Louis.

It seemed to Ronald to be the first expression of any doubt, but he was mistaken. It came to him that these men had seen and heard things stranger even than this.

‘It’s not enough,’ Louis continued. ‘We need more. We can’t go in blind.’

Ronald had thought on this too. He had ransacked his memories of tribal lore – the Cherokee worship of the cedar tree, based on the belief that the Creator had imbued it with the spirits of those who had perished during the times of eternal night; the Canotila or tree dwellers of the Lakota; the Abenaki’s tale of the creation of man from the bark of ash trees; and the forest-dwelling Mikum-wasus of his own Penobscot people – but he could find no explanation in them for what he had seen. He had a vision of a great tree growing upside down, its leafess crown far below the ground, its trunk extending upward to roots that twitched and groped, breaking through the earth to the air above; and at its heart, surrounded by the husks of dead girls, was an entity that had come from far away, a spirit that had infused the stones of an old church, travelling with it as it crossed land and sea before retreating into the new ground in which the foundations of that church were laid, creating a form for itself from wood and sap. But the question that consumed him most was its nature, for he believed that men created gods as much, if not more, than gods created men. If this old god existed, it did so because there were men and women who permitted it to continue to exist through their beliefs. They fed it, and it, in turn, fed them.