“I just need some information,” Kane said. “History, really.”
“You could have picked a better time to talk about the old days,” the woman said, “but what’s done is done. Help yourself to a cup of coffee in the kitchen and I’ll be down soon.”
The dark-haired young man was sitting at the kitchen island spooning cereal into his mouth.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” Kane said, pouring coffee into a mug.
The young man nodded and swallowed.
“It’s Feather’s really,” he said. “We just room here. We’re college students.”
Kane took a drink of coffee. It was very good.
“The rent high?” he asked.
The young man laughed.
“Rent,” he said. “Right. There’s three of us live here. We each pay the rent once a week. Franklin’s paying his right now.” He put his cereal bowl into the sink. “Guys been lining up to rent rooms here for years,” he said, making little quotation marks around “rent rooms” with his fingers. “Well, gotta go. Classes.”
Left alone, Kane picked up his coffee and made a tour of the downstairs. The living room featured comfortable-looking couches. The dining room table was solid cherry and could seat a dozen. Original artwork dotted the walls, and every window had a view.
The dark-haired young man came down the stairs dressed, took a coat out of the closet next to the front door, and left. He was followed not long after by another young man. Kane was just starting his third cup of coffee when the blond one came flying down the stairs, dressing as he went.
“Damn, late again,” he said, grinning, as he ran past.
By the time the woman came down the stairs, Kane had about memorized the ground floor of the house. It was all very tastefully and expensively done, right down to the leather-bound books that filled the walls of what appeared to be a den.
“I’m sorry for the wait,” the woman said, extending a hand.
Kane took it. The bones were delicate and the back of the hand was lined with veins. Feather Collins looked every bit her sixty-some years around the edges, where spas and cosmetic surgery couldn’t hide the effects of aging. But otherwise she looked damn good.
“You’re staring, Mr. . . .” she said.
“Kane,” Kane said. “Nik Kane. I’m sorry. It’s just that I expected someone older.”
The woman smiled.
“Oh, I’m old enough,” she said, “but I’ll take that as a compliment. Would you care to sit down?”
They sat across from one another in the living room. The woman tucked her legs up underneath her.
“A lifetime of yoga has its rewards,” she said. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“It’s about a young woman named Faith Wright,” he said. “She’s missing.”
“Faith Wright,” the woman said. “Thomas Wright’s daughter?”
“Yes,” Kane said.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she said. “Faith was quite young when I left Rejoice, and I haven’t seen her since.”
Kane nodded.
“I didn’t expect you could tell me much about the girl,” he said. “But I was hoping you could fill me in on some history of Rejoice, about the Wrights and Faith’s grand-mother, who also disappeared. Margaret Anderson?”
“Peggy Anderson. We all called her Peggy, all of us except Moses,” the woman said. “That takes me back. Do you think the two disappearances are related?”
“I don’t really know,” Kane said, giving the woman what he hoped was a charming smile. “The truth is, I’ve run out of real leads to follow, and I’m here grasping at straws.”
“Couldn’t anyone in Rejoice tell you about her?”
“Not really. Most of the original group that settled Rejoice has died off or moved away. Except for Moses Wright, you may be the last of the people who founded Rejoice who is still in Alaska, not counting a few people who were children then.”
“Like my ex-husband, you mean? How is Gregory?”
“He’s doing well, the last time I saw him. As is your son.”
Something in the tone of Kane’s voice made the woman straighten in her seat.
“Do you think it odd, Mr. Kane, that I have severed contact with my son?” she asked.
“A little,” Kane said, “but it’s really none of my business.”
The woman sat staring at Kane for a long time.
“If you’re going to hear the whole story of my goddamn life,” she said, “you’ll need something stronger than just coffee.”
She got up, took Kane’s mug, and walked to the kitchen. She dumped the contents into the sink, got another mug, poured coffee into the mugs, then added something from a bottle. She got a can of whipped cream out of the refrigerator and sprayed some into each mug. She walked back into the living room, set Kane’s in front of him, and took her seat.
“Now, then, we can begin,” she said, cradling her mug. She took a sip, licked the whipped cream off her upper lip, and started talking.
“I was coming on fifteen when Mikey Hogan took me out behind the bottling plant in south Boston to show me something. He was about ten years older, and my mother, God rest her soul, didn’t want me having anything to do with him. Mikey and his half brother, Francis, who was a few years younger than him, were nothing but trouble, she said.”
The woman raised her cup in a mock salute.
“You got that right, mom.
“But I liked it from the first, so I hung around with Mikey when I could sneak away. He was a guy around the neighborhood, running errands for bookies and such, and devilish handsome. We were hot and heavy for a few years. Then I graduated high school and went off to college, and he lost interest. We still knew each other and spent time together during the summers, but we quit having what the parish priest called carnal knowledge of each other.
“I didn’t mind, though. There were plenty of guys at college. I graduated and moved back to the old neighborhood and got a job. Then the sixties hit and Mikey had plenty of dope. He still liked young girls and would bring them around to my place. Young boys, too, which is why I let him in. Before I knew it, there was a bunch of us crashing there. Then Mikey started talking about going far away, to Alaska. To get back to the earth, like people were talking then. We pooled our money and bought a bus, and Francis, who was always good with engines, got the thing running. We painted it all up and stocked it and everything, and it just sat there in the lot behind my apartment until one day Mikey said, ‘We’re going.’ And we went.”
She stopped talking for a while, then continued.
“You know, I look at these young people now and think, what were we doing then? Mikey and I were old enough to know better, but we didn’t give a damn. The rest of them, the oldest was maybe seventeen. Where were their parents?
“The whole thing was weird. Like Francis not coming along. There’d been some sort of robbery out at the airport there, and Francis had been grabbed up by the cops, Mikey said.
“None of us paid much attention then. Like I said, Mikey had plenty of dope and always seemed to have money when we needed it, and we floated across America making love, not war.
“When we got to San Francisco, some people left and some people joined up. By the time we headed north, we were a convoy, the bus and several cars. Mikey started calling himself Moses, because he was leading us to the promised land, and sleeping with the sweetest young thing on the bus, pretty Peggy Anderson.”
The woman was quiet again for a while.
“He liked them young, but who doesn’t? Anyway, that first winter was rough, living in the bus in the cold. Fortunately, we had more girls than boys, so we attracted a couple of young locals who knew what they were doing. We made it through the winter and everything looked good. That summer we got a few cabins built and some gardens planted and caught some fish and used Mikey’s money for the rest. Only everybody called him Moses by then, Moses Wright, and when I kidded him about it in private he gave me such a look that I called him Moses from then on, too.
“About the only attention we attracted, besides the local boys, was from the trooper who was stationed out there—a big, young, good-looking guy. He was always dropping in. At first I thought he was suspicious, but he didn’t do anything and we gradually came to accept him. We kept the dope out of sight, but otherwise he was just another visitor.
“Then, that fall, Peggy was pregnant. I was surprised. When I was seeing him, Mikey was never careful about birth control and neither was I, but nothing happened. I’d gotten pregnant once, in college, so I figured maybe it was Mikey who was shooting blanks. But then Peggy got knocked up, so I guessed it had all just been luck.
“The baby, Thomas, was born in June. We had a big celebration, I remember, with a bonfire and fireworks, and Mikey looked proud enough to bust. But he and Peggy started having trouble not long after. We were still living close together then, and I could hear them yelling at each other at night. That winter Peggy disappeared, and not long after Mikey began toting a Bible around. I thought he was just goofing, but he was deadly serious. About the Bible, about being Moses, about the whole religion thing. He even quit chasing the young girls for a while, although everybody was paired up by then, so he didn’t have much choice.”
The woman drained her cup and got to her feet.
“You want more?” she asked.
Kane shook his head. The first one hadn’t been a good idea all by itself.
“I’m having more,” she said, “and if you want to hear what I’ve got to say, so are you.”
Kane handed her his mug. He didn’t want to hear more, not really. He felt worse now than he had when he’d knocked on the door, and the Irish coffee wasn’t helping. But he took the fresh mug from her and drank as she resumed talking.
“The trooper looked hard for Peggy,” the woman said. “He questioned us all, especially Mikey, but didn’t get anywhere. The next summer, another young girl moved in, and Mikey took up with her, and then another after that, but they didn’t stick. Maybe he just wanted help with the baby. Anyway, a few years went by. Mikey was really Moses by now, and most everybody else in Rejoice was getting religious, too.
“Then, one day right around summer solstice, Francis showed up. Everything was cool for a week or so, then he and Mikey had a big row and Francis left Rejoice. He didn’t go far, though. Some of the less religious element of Rejoice had moved over into the woods around Devil’s Toe because they didn’t like all the new rules Mikey was making. Francis moved over there, too, and somehow got the money to buy the roadhouse there.”
“He was calling himself John Wesley Harding by then?” Kane asked.
“Yes,” the woman said with a smile, “he was. Mikey warned me against having anything to do with him. Not that he needed to. I never liked Francis that much. He was mean and not very smart.”
“Why were you sticking around?” Kane asked, interested despite himself. “You were educated, and used to a better life. Why didn’t you leave?”
“Inertia, at first,” the woman said, “and a steady supply of young drifters. And then I noticed little Gregory Pinchon. He couldn’t have been more than eight then, but God, he was a beautiful child. I waited, and when he was sixteen and legal, I took him into my bed. It was quite a scandal. I was in my mid-forties and all the tongues were wagging. But I made sure he got me pregnant right away, and then nobody could stop us getting married. It was about the time Matthew was born that the community decided we needed some rules about young people and sex and came up with all that ‘walking out’ garbage.”
“What happened?” Kane asked. “Why did you leave?”
The woman took their mugs into the kitchen, then brought them back. When Kane tasted his, it was straight whiskey.
“Young men are great for some things,” she said, slurring some of her words, “but Gregory didn’t wear well on me. He was beautiful, but repressed sexually, probably by all that religious nonsense. And outside of bed we didn’t have anything to build a marriage on. Besides that, I was a rotten mother.”
Kane could hear a slur in his own voice when he spoke.
“Was that all?” he asked. “The whole reason you left?”
“No,” she said. “There was Mikey, too. He was stirring people up against me. By then, I didn’t know if that was because he believed I was too sinful or because I was about the only person left in Rejoice who knew him from the old days.
“So I took the hint and left. Came here. Divorced Gregory. Met a man, a nice fellow, man named Collins, who had a lot of money. All that time I’d spent studying the Kama Sutra came in handy then. He married me. Five years ago, he dropped dead. I’ve been taking in boarders ever since.”
Very carefully, Kane set his mug down.
“That’s quite a story,” he said. “Did you ever have any idea what happened to Margaret Anderson Wright?”
“Nope,” the woman said. She shook her head from side to side for what seemed to Kane like a long while. “I thought it was strange she’d run off and leave her baby, but none of us was too stable. I think the trooper thought something bad had happened, but like I said, nothing ever came of it.”
They sat looking at one another for a moment.
“That’s some scar you’ve got,” the woman said. “What happened?”
“I had a difference of opinion with a sharp object,” Kane said. Or that’s what he tried to say. It came out sounding like something in Russian.
“You must be a rough customer,” the woman said, giving a theatrical shiver.
Kane got carefully to his feet and started to put on his coat. He got his arm into the wrong hole and had to start over. When he looked, the woman was smiling at his antics.
“You don’t have to leave,” she said. “You could lie down with me awhile. I’ve got a big, soft bed upstairs.”
“I appreciate the offer,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure that I’d just embarrass myself, particularly compared to your boarders.”
He held out his hand and shook hers, then made his way to the door as carefully as if he were walking on a tightrope high above the ground.