Chapter 79
As promised, Macy arrived at my house with enough barbecue from Wilson County to induce a coronary in the dead.
I put the food in the oven to stay warm while we fooled around; by a certain age, one doesn’t want to be exerting oneself on a full stomach.
Afterward, we split a half bottle of wine over dinner and I told her about Scott Theriault’s parents, the encounters with Jenny Berrien and Roger Teal, and what subsequently transpired in Pittsfield.
“But you still have no proof that Scott Theriault might have been seeing Mallory Norton?” Macy asked.
Macy was wearing one of my T-shirts. She looked better in it than I ever had.
“If I did I’d share it with the police,” I said. “You know that.”
“Sorry, of course I do. Some things you’ll keep hidden, but not anything that might help trace a lost girl.”
“And her disappearance may have nothing to do with Spero,” I said.
“That’s what bothers me. We could be looking at two, even three, unrelated incidents: the death of Scott Theriault, the vanishing of Mallory Norton, and whatever Teal, Kenney, and potentially Santopietro have been up to at the school, which might be nothing worse than embezzlement—not that I’m condoning illegality, officer, but we all have to choose our battles. ”
“Except you don’t believe they’re unconnected, do you?”
“It would be easier to accept in a city. But in a plantation of forty square miles in Somerset County, with a population that only nudges eighty or so thanks to a residential school? Even allowing for a circumference that encompasses Bingham, that’s the kind of range where coincidences wither and die. ”
“They’re odd places, aren’t they, those old townships?” said Macy. “They’re too close to the past for comfort. The lines become blurred.”
In cities, the past was buried, the present built over its bones.
Fragments of the bygone remained in the form of structures or names that had survived for generations, yet frequently the past was a phantom, existing only as memories.
But in somewhere like The Plains, where the marks left by men were minimal, the distinctions between past and present broke down, the existing landscape not dissimilar to how it had once been.
In The Plains, it was possible to feel the persistence of antiquity.
Macy finished her wine, put the glass by the sink, and asked if I was coming to bed. I told her I’d follow in a few minutes.
“Don’t be too long,” she said. “I’m tired, on account of all that physical activity you just put me through, so I can’t promise I’ll be awake if you tarry.”
I watched her leave. I was glad she was with me, and I with her.
But as she went, I felt an intimation of loss that was at once both premonition and remembrance, one familiar from when Rachel was the woman with whom I shared this house.
I used to think it was because of what happened to my wife: Having lost before, how could there not be the fear of losing again?
But I now realized that I had also feared losing Susan, and not in the generalized way of one who loves and does not wish to be without the object of that love, but more singularly.
A chain of losses snaked back, into obscurity, into forgetfulness, but that opacity was no longer complete: shapes were emerging, faces, incidents.
A cycle of grief, a cycle of punishment.