What harm can it do?

I wanted to get away from there. I wanted to talk to the Beckers, to force them-at gunpoint if necessary-to tell me where their daughter was hiding. I wanted to know what Grace Peltier had found. I wanted to sleep.

Most of all, I wanted to find Mr. Pudd, and the mute, and the old man who had wanted Rachel's skin: Aaron Faulkner. His wife was among the dead of St. Froid but he was not, and neither were his two children. A boy and a girl, I remembered. What age would they be now: late forties, early fifties? Ms. Torrance had been too young, as was Lutz. Unless there were others hidden elsewhere, which I doubted, that left only Pudd and the mute: they were Leonard and Muriel Faulkner, dispatched, when required, to do their father's bidding.

Wallace gave me a ride back to my car after eleven that night, threats of retribution still ringing in my ears. Angel and Louis were with Rachel when I returned home, drinking beer and watching television with the volume almost muted. All three of them left me alone while I stripped and showered, then pulled on a pair of chinos and a sweater. A new cell phone lay on the kitchen table, the memory card salvaged from the wreckage of the old phone and reinstalled. I took a bottle of Pete's Wicked Ale from the fridge and twisted it open. I could smell the hops and the distinctive fruity scent. I raised it to my mouth and took one mouthful, my first sip of alcohol in two years, then held it for as long as I was able. When at last I swallowed, it was warm and thick with saliva. I poured the rest into a glass and drank half of it, then sat looking at what remained. After a time, I took the glass to the sink and poured the beer down the drain.

It wasn't exactly a moment of revelation, more a confirmation. I didn't want it, not now. I could take it or leave it, and I chose to let it go. Amy had been right; it was just something to fill the hole, and I had found other ways to do that. But for now, nothing in a bottle was going to make things better.

I shivered again. Despite the shower and the change of clothes, I still hadn't been able to get warm. I could taste the salt on my lips, could smell the brine in my hair, and each time I did I was back on the waters of the bay, the Eliza May drifting slowly before me and Jack Mercier's body swaying gently against the sky.

I placed the bottle in the recycling box and looked up to see Rachel leaning against the door.

“You're not finishing it?” she said softly.

I shook my head. For a moment or two, I couldn't speak. I felt something breaking up inside of me, like a stone in my heart that my system was now ready to expel. A pain at the very center of my being began to spread throughout my body: to my fingers and toes, to my groin, to the tips of my ears. Wave after wave of it rocked me, so that I had to hold on to the sink to stop myself from falling. I squeezed my eyes closed tightly and saw:

a young woman emerging from an oil barrel by a canal in Louisiana, her teeth bared in her final agony and her body encased in a cocoon of transformed body fats, dumped by the Traveling Man after he had blinded her and killed her; a little dead boy running through my house in the middle of the night, calling me to play; Jack Mercier, burning with a desperate flame as his wife was dragged bleeding belowdecks; blood and water mixing on the pale, distorted features of Mickey Shine; my grandfather, his memory fading slowly away; my father sitting at a kitchen table, ruffling my hair with his great hand; and Susan and Jennifer, splayed across a kitchen chair-lost to me and yet not lost, gone and yet forever with me…

The pain made a rushing sound as it passed through me, and I thought I detected voices calling to me, over and over, as at last it reached its peak. My body tensed, my mouth opened, and I heard myself speak.

“It wasn't my fault,” I whispered.

Her brow furrowed. “I don't understand.”

“It-wasn't-my-fault,” I repeated. There were huge gaps between the words as I retched each one up and spat it, blinking, into the light. I licked my upper lip and tasted, again, salt and beer. My head was pounding in time to my heart, and I thought I was going to burn up. Past and present twisted and intertwined with each other like snakes in a pit. New deaths and old, old guilts and new, the pain of them white hot even as I spoke.

“None of it,” I said. My eyes were blurring, and now there was fresh salt water on my cheeks and lips. “I couldn't have saved them. If I'd been with them, I'd have died too. I did everything that I could. I'm still trying to do it, but I couldn't have saved them.”

And I didn't know about whom I was speaking. I think I was talking about them all: the man on the mast; Grace and Curtis Peltier; a woman and child, a year earlier, lying on the floor of a cheap apartment; another woman, another child, in the kitchen of our home in Brooklyn a year before that again; my father, my mother, my grandfather; a little boy with a bullet wound for an eye.

All of them.

And I heard them calling my name from the places in which they lay, their voices echoing through burrows and pits, caverns and caves until the honeycomb world vibrated with the sound of them.

“I tried,” I whispered. “But I couldn't save them all.”

And then her arms were around me and the world collapsed, waiting for us to rebuild it again in our image.

24

I SLEPT A STRANGE, disturbed sleep in her arms that night, twisting and clawing at unseen things. Angel and Louis were in the spare room and all of the doors were locked and bolted, so we were safe for a time, but she had no peace beside me. I dreamed I was sinking into dark waters where Jack Mercier waited for me, his skin burning beneath the waves, Curtis Peltier beside him, his arms bleeding black blood into the depths. When I tried to rise they held me back, their dead hands digging into my legs. My head throbbed and my lungs ached, the pressure increasing upon me until at last I was forced to open my mouth and the salt water flooded my nose and mouth.

Then I would wake, over and over, to find her close beside me, whispering softly, her hands moving in a slow rhythm across my brow and through my hair. And so the night passed.

The next morning we ate a hurried breakfast, then prepared to separate. Louis, Rachel, and I would head for Bar Harbor and a final confrontation with the Beckers. Angel had repaired the phone at the house and would stay there so we would have room for maneuvering if needed. When I checked my cell-phone messages on the way to the car, there was only one: it came from Ali Wynn, asking me to call her.

“You told me to contact you if somebody started asking about Grace,” she said, when I reached her. “Somebody did.”

“Who was it?”

“A policeman. He came to the restaurant yesterday. He was a detective. I saw his shield.”

“You get his name?”

“Lutz. He said he was investigating Grace's death. He wanted to know when I saw her last.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just what I told you, and nothing else.”

“What did you think of him?”

She considered the question. “He frightened me. I didn't go home last night. I stayed with a friend.”

“Have you seen him since yesterday?”

“No, I think he believed me.”

“Did he tell you how he got your name?”

“Grace's tutor. I talked to her last night. She said she gave him the names of two of Grace's friends: me, and Marcy Becker.”

It was just after 9 A.M., and we were almost at Augusta, when the cell phone rang. I didn't recognize the number.

“Mr. Parker?” said a female voice. “It's Helen Becker, Marcy's mother.”

I mouthed the words “Mrs. Becker” to Rachel.

“We were just on our way to see you, Mrs. Becker.”