Chapter 39
A new storm front had moved in overnight, and under dark clouds, the surface of Maiden Pond was black and wind churned. Maggie and Declan sat in Declan’s Volvo in the boat ramp parking lot, peering through binoculars at the cottages along the shore. Only two days ago, it had been sunny and warm, but Maine weather was famously fickle, and judging by the ominous clouds overhead, thunder and rain were imminent.
“Nasty weather ahead,” said Declan. “I think they’ll all be staying indoors for the day. Which, come to think of it, sounds like quite a nice idea. Sit by the fireplace, sip some Irish coffee ...”
She focused her binoculars on the figure who’d just emerged from one of the cottages. “Hannah Greene’s not staying inside. She’s getting in her car. I wonder where she’s off to.”
Declan pulled out his pocket notebook. “Hannah Greene inherited the cottage from her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Harold Greene. According to our friend Betty Jones, Dr. Greene purchased their house in 1968, initially planning to live here year round. Nine months later, George and Elizabeth Conover bought the house next door to the Greenes. Cash purchases, both of them. Since then, the homes have been extensively updated. They’re now used only as summer residences.”
She shot him an amused glance. “You got all that information out of Betty?”
“All it takes is a box of cranberry nut muffins from the Marigold. What can I say, our Betty the Realtor has a sweet tooth.”
“Or a taste for charming gentlemen.”
He gave a modest shrug. “I have my talents.”
“Go, tiger.” She refocused on Hannah’s car as it drove away. “And she’s sixty-one?”
“Which means she would have been eight years old when Vivian Stillwater quit and left. A girl that young probably had no inkling of what her father’s job really entailed.”
Maggie lowered her binoculars. “I wonder what she’d think of her father now, if she learned the truth about him. About the work he was doing.”
“People can justify almost anything, Maggie. That’s why history keeps repeating itself.”
She thought of the choices she, too, had been forced to justify during her career, choices she now regretted. In the line of duty, yes, people could defend almost any action, but there was usually a price to be paid. For Maggie, the price had been unbearably tragic.
She wondered if Dr. Harold Greene had ever regretted his choices.
“There’s Arthur Fox,” said Declan.
She raised her binoculars again and watched as Fox descended the steps from his back deck and headed down the lawn toward the water. “He’s really eighty-two? He looks very fit for his age,” she noted.
“Two days ago, I was fit for my age.”
She snorted. “Two days ago, you were young and foolish. You climbed that tree.”
“Does our very fit Mr. Fox look capable of tossing a fifteen-year-old girl into a ravine?”
She watched Fox drag his kayak away from the water’s edge and haul it uphill, to a more secure spot on the grass. “I’d say so.”
Declan flipped through his notebook again. “As Ingrid discovered, Mr. Fox calls himself a ‘retired energy consultant.’”
“As if that’s not a giveaway.”
“He’s never been married, has no children as far as we know. His early stint with the US Army is where it gets interesting. We know he was stationed at Fort Holabird, Maryland.”
“US Army Intelligence.”
“And here’s another interesting detail. Ten years ago, he became an ordained Universalist minister. Maybe he had a crisis of conscience.”
“Assuming he has a conscience.”
Fox vanished back into his cottage, and she turned her attention to Moonview. Both the Conover vehicles were parked at the house, so she assumed the entire family must be at home. Someone moved past a downstairs window, then paced back again, but no one stepped outside. It was too chilly and damp to be outdoors today, and she thought of Susan, trapped inside the house amid all the tensions swirling between her and her in-laws.
Maggie could not think of a more miserable situation.
She turned her attention to the opposite shore, and focused her binoculars on the sad little house where Reuben and Abigail Tarkin lived. Unlike the Conovers, who were merely summer residents, Reuben and his sister lived year round on Maiden Pond. For true Mainers like the Tarkins, hard winters and spring mud seasons were the price one paid to deserve these few precious months of summer.
She lowered her binoculars. “What did Betty Jones tell you about the Tarkins?” she asked.
“She said the property’s been in their family for generations. That’s the undesirable side of the pond, marshy, lots of mosquitoes. Their house is so old, it’s probably still on the original well and septic.”
“I mean, aside from the value of their real estate. What did she say about the Tarkins themselves?”
“Their mother died just last year, left the house to Reuben and his sister Abigail. Neither one’s ever been married. Betty says the family’s been pretty much shunned by the town, ever since Sam Tarkin killed those people on Main Street.”
Maggie lowered her binoculars. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Where?”
“It’s time to hear the real reason why Reuben Tarkin hates the Conovers.”
Reuben stood in his doorway, as unyielding as a praetorian guarding his palace, although this palace was little more than a shack with a moss-covered roof. He was not a tall man, and his hair had gone almost entirely gray, but at age sixty-five, he was still solid and muscular and powerful enough to be a problem should he decide to be. She’d ordered Declan to stay in the car because she thought a lone woman would seem less threatening to Reuben. Now she wondered if she’d miscalculated, if Reuben would consider a lone woman as simply easier to overcome.
“Mr. Tarkin, my name is Maggie Bird,” she said. “I’m working with Jo Thibodeau to find out who abducted Zoe Conover.”
“I had nothing to do with it.”
“I know that.”
“Then why are you talking to me ?”
“Because you may be able to help us. We need information about the people across the pond.”
“The Conovers, you mean.”
“And Arthur Fox. And the late Dr. Greene. They were all working together, weren’t they?”
His next move was so sudden she had no time to react. He lurched toward her, and she almost expected a blow or a shove. Instead, he pulled the door shut behind him and moved in so close they were almost nose to nose.
“My sister’s sleeping. I don’t want her to hear this.”
“We’ll go somewhere else, then. Somewhere we can talk.”
He considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “No, it’s better if I just take you there.”
“Take me where?”
“Come with me.”
He headed up his driveway, toward where the Volvo was parked. Abruptly he halted, staring at Declan, who had just climbed out of the car and now stood ready to spring into action, or whatever qualified as action for a man on crutches.
“This is Declan Rose,” she said to Reuben. “He’s my friend. You can trust him.”
“He can’t come with us.”
“If Maggie’s going with you, so am I,” said Declan, swinging toward them on his crutches.
Reuben snorted. “You’ll never make it. Not on those things.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Reuben pointed up the road. “The trail starts down that way, and it climbs halfway up the mountain. It’s all overgrown now, can’t bring a car up anymore. Which means we have to walk.” He looked at Declan’s cast. “You’d just slow us down.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said to Declan. “Please, just wait here.”
Declan was clearly uneasy about the situation, but even he had to concede that he couldn’t hike up a hill on crutches. He gave Reuben a hard look. “I’ll be waiting right here until you get back. Both of you.”
Reuben nodded and started walking up the road. She followed him.
It was soon apparent why this was the less desirable side of Maiden Pond. The shore here was largely marshland, and the water was spiky with cattails and sedge. There were also biting clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies that bred on this boggy shore, and they tormented her, swarming up from the puddles left by two days of rain. The bugs did not seem to bother Reuben. He didn’t even wave them away but just tramped ahead, undeterred by such minor irritants. She had studied the dossier that Ingrid and Lloyd compiled on Reuben Tarkin, so she knew a great deal about him, on paper, anyway—his birth date, family tree, school transcripts, and arrest records—but those were cold data points, lacking texture. She knew he was descended from a long line of Mainers. She knew his sister, Abigail, had spent most of her life in a wheelchair because of a spinal astrocytoma that required surgery when she was a child, and their father, Samuel, had been a well-regarded carpenter in town.
Until the day he massacred four people on Main Street before being shot to death by a Purity police officer.
Data points, that’s all they were, mere details she could read on a page. Human beings, though, were not so easy to read, and the silent man striding ahead of her was little more than a featureless figure in the gloom, leading her to an undisclosed destination.
They reached the remains of a gravel road that sloped up a hill overlooking Maiden Pond. Clearly, no car had climbed this slope in years, and the path was now overgrown with saplings. Soon it would be swallowed up entirely by the forest, nature’s relentless invader. Reuben started up the hill.
He moved at the pace of a far younger man, not pausing to catch his breath, or to glance back to see if she was still behind him. She struggled to keep pace as they kept climbing, past a storage shed, past a sagging chain-link fence. There was nothing to indicate where this gravel road might lead, but a faded No Trespassing sign and a coil of rusting barbed wire told her this had been forbidden property. Now that the fence had fallen, there was nothing to stop any trespassers, except for this demanding climb.
Reuben came to a halt, and she stopped beside him. Only then could she see, through the trees ahead, why they had trekked into these dark and claustrophobic woods. It was starting to rain again, not a heavy downpour, just a steady drip, drip onto the fallen leaves.
“They called it the Lodge,” Reuben said.
He pointed to what must have originally served as a rustic retreat, before time and termites took their toll on the structure. Now the roof sagged and the porch railings had rotted and collapsed. The porch faced west, and the panoramic vista once would have included Maiden Pond, all the way to the mountains and beyond, but the trees had since grown too tall, smothering the view.
“What is this place?” Maggie asked.
“This is where they brought the people. ‘Want to make fifty bucks? Come up to the Lodge,’ they’d say.” He pointed to the porch. “My dad repaired those steps, built that railing for them. He made it good and solid, better than it ever was. Look at it now.” He shook his head. “Nothing lasts. Nothing stays the same.”
“Your father worked for them?”
Reuben nodded. “Fixed up their houses, down on the pond. If you needed someone to swing a hammer, he was the first man they’d call. He installed their cabinets, replaced their skylights, built their decks. Worked seven days a week, just to pay the bills. All the operations my sister needed. So when they asked him if he wanted to earn a little extra, of course he said yes. And this is where he came.”
She’d already guessed what Sam Tarkin agreed to, but she said nothing. She allowed Reuben to fill the silence, in his own time. Instead of saying more, he climbed the disintegrating stairs to the porch and stepped gingerly over a gap left by a collapsed plank. Although the door was not locked, summer humidity had swelled it in place, and it took him two hard kicks to dislodge the door. It swung open with a bang.
She followed him inside.
The building smelled like dust and mold and half a century’s accumulation of mouse droppings. One of the windows was shattered, and dead leaves lay scattered across the pine floor. The planks creaked under her weight as she crossed to the stone fireplace. There she saw a mound of cold ashes, as well as half a dozen cigarette butts. There had been trespassers, of course; teenagers were always quick to find and exploit any abandoned building, and the evidence was all around them, in the empty beer cans littering the floor and the graffiti scrawled on the walls.
“They’d sit in a circle, around that fireplace,” Reuben said. “My dad said they had cushions on the floor, so everyone would be comfortable. Said it was like they were throwing a party, passing out favors, while Dr. Greene and his people watched and took notes. They told my dad that as long as he kept coming, so would the money. They told him it was all perfectly safe, that the drugs had all been tested by the government, and he believed them. Oh, she was convincing.”
She. “So it was Vivian Stillwater who recruited him?”
“No.” He turned and looked at Maggie. “It was Elizabeth Conover.”
She stared at him. This was a surprise, although she should have considered that possibility. A married team had advantages. They could work in tandem, without the need to keep secrets from each other. If Elizabeth also worked in the project, if she was the one who’d actually recruited Sam Tarkin for their experiments, it would explain Reuben’s rage against the Conovers.
“After it happened, the police came to talk to my mother. They made it seem like it was all her fault. They said she must have known he was going insane, but how could she? She didn’t know that what they were giving him was dangerous. But they must have known. The Conovers, Dr. Greene. And they never said a word, never warned us. We had no idea what could happen, until the day my father—the day he—” His voice broke. He turned and strode out of the building.
She emerged to find him standing a dozen paces away, a lone, lost figure among the trees. Rain fell on his bare head, but he didn’t seem to notice it dripping down his face, sliding onto the collar of his shirt.
“Why haven’t you told anyone about this?”
“I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed to.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was part of the agreement they made with my mother.”
“Who made this agreement?”
“Dr. Greene and his people. He said that if we kept it to ourselves, if we never told anyone about the experiments, the government would keep the checks coming. Enough money to pay for all the care my sister needed. To cover the taxes on the house, put food on the table. We were paid to stay silent. All these years, I wanted to talk, I wanted to shout the truth, but I couldn’t. My mother and my sister wouldn’t let me.”
“Then why are you telling me now?”
“Because it isn’t fucking worth it anymore! Selling our souls. Selling out our father.” He let out a deep breath, and with that breath he seemed to release his pent-up rage. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway,” he said quietly, and turned to look at her. “The doctor said Abigail’s got cancer. In six months, she won’t need that money anymore.”
As the rain fell in a steady drip on their heads, Maggie thought of the damage that had been done to ordinary people like the Tarkins and to others whose names would never be known. For half a century, Reuben had lived in shame and suffered in silence. No wonder he was angry. No wonder he despised people like the Conovers, who’d shattered his life and then blithely sailed into a comfortable government-paid retirement. Every morning, when Reuben looked across Maiden Pond at Moonview, he’d be reminded that life was not fair. Not to people like the Tarkin family.
“If we expose them now, Mr. Tarkin, if they find out you gave me this information, there could be consequences for you. For your settlement. The money might stop coming.”
“I’ve lived with the consequences for fifty-three years.” He looked at Maggie. “Now it’s their turn.”