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so calorific that Weight Watchers should place a permanent picket on the door;
gingerbread pancakes with lemon sauce, orange graham French toast, and lobster
Benedict are not the kind of breakfast items that contribute to a slim
waistline, although they're guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of even the most
jaded dietician. I settled for fresh fruit, wheat toast, and coffee, which
made me feel very virtuous but also kind of sad. The sight of the spiders had
taken away most of my appetite anyhow. It could have been kids playing a joke,
I supposed, but if so, then it was a vicious, deeply unpleasant one.
Waterville, the site of the Fellowship's office, was midway between Portland
and Bangor. After Bangor I could head east to Ellsworth and the area of U.S. 1
where Grace Peltier's body had been discovered. From Ellsworth, Bar Harbor,
home of Grace's good friend but funeral absentee Marcy Becker, was only a
short drive to the coast. I finished off my coffee, took a last lingering look
at a plate of apple, cinnamon, and raisin French toast that was heading toward
a table by the window, then stepped outside and walked to my car.
Across the street, a man sat at the base of the steps leading up to the main
post office. He wore a brown suit with a yellow shirt and a brown-and-red tie
beneath a long, dark brown overcoat. Short, spiky red hair, tinged slightly
with gray, stood up straight on his head as if he were permanently plugged
into an electrical outlet. He was eating an ice cream cone. His mouth worked
at the ice cream in a relentless methodical motion, never stopping once to
savor the taste. There was something unpleasant, almost insectlike, about the
way his mouth moved, and I felt his eyes upon me as I opened the car door and
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sat inside. When I pulled away from the curb, those eyes followed me. In the
rearview, I could see his head turn to watch my progress, the mouth still
working like the jaws of a mantid.
The Fellowship had its registered office at 109A Main Street, in the middle of
Waterville's central business district. Parts of Waterville are pretty but
downtown is a mess, largely because it looks like the ugly Ames shopping mall
was dropped randomly from the sky and allowed to remain where it landed,
reducing a huge tract of the town center to a glorified parking lot. Still,
enough brownstone blocks remained to support a sign welcoming visitors to the
joys of downtown Waterville, among them the modest offices of the Fellowship.
They occupied the top two floors over an otherwise vacant storefront down from
Joe's Smoke Shop, nestled between the Head Quarters hairdressing salon and
Jorgensen's Café. I parked in the Ames lot and crossed at Joe's. There was a
buzzer beside the locked glass door of 109A, with a small fish-eye lens
beneath it. A metal plate on the door frame was engraved with the words: THE
FELLOWSHIP LET THE LORD GUIDE YOU. A small shelf to one side held a sheaf of
pamphlets. I took one and slipped it into my pocket, then rang the buzzer and
heard a voice crackle in response. It sounded suspiciously like that of Ms.
Torrance.
Can I help you? it said.
I'm here to see Carter Paragon, I replied.
I'm afraid Mr. Paragon is busy. The day had hardly begun and already I was
experiencing déjà vu.
But I let the Lord guide me here, I protested. You wouldn't want to let Him
down, would you?
The only sound that came from the speaker was that of the connection between
us being closed. I rang again.
Yes? The irritation in her voice was obvious.
Maybe I could wait for Mr. Paragon?
That won't be possible. This is not a public office. Any contact with Mr.
Paragon should be made in writing in the first instance. Have a good day.
I had a feeling that a good day for Ms. Torrance would probably be a pretty
bad day for me. It also struck me that in the course of our entire
conversation, Ms. Torrance had not asked me my name or my business. It might
simply have been my suspicious nature, but I guessed that Ms. Torrance already
knew who I was. More to the point, she knew what I looked like.
I walked around the block to Temple Street and the rear of the Fellowship's
offices. There was a small parking lot, its concrete cracked and overgrown
with weeds, dominated by a dead tree beneath which stood two tanks of propane.
The back door of the building was white and the windows were screened, while
the black iron fire escape looked so decrepit that any occupants might have
been better advised to take their chances with the flames. It didn't look like
the back door to 109A had been opened in some time, which meant that the
occupants of the building entered and left through the door on Main Street.
There was one car in the lot, a red 4 x 4 Explorer. When I peered in the
window I saw a box on the floor containing what looked like more religious
pamphlets bound with rubber bands. Using my elementary deduction skills, I
guessed that I'd found the Fellowship's wheels.
I went back onto Main Street, bought a couple of newspapers and the latest
issue of Rolling Stone, then headed into Jorgensen's and took a seat at the
raised table by the window. From there I had a perfect view of the doorway to
109A. I ordered coffee and a muffin, then sat back to read and wait.
The newspapers were full of the discovery at St. Froid, although they couldn't
add much to the news reports I'd seen on television. Still, somebody had
dredged up an old photograph of Faulkner and the original four families that
had journeyed north with him. He was a tall man, plainly dressed, with long
dark hair, very straight black eyebrows, and sunken cheeks. Even in the
photograph, there was an undeniable charisma to him. He was probably in his
late thirties, his wife slightly older. Their children, a boy and a girl aged
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about seventeen and sixteen respectively, stood in front of him. He must have
been comparatively young when they were born.
Despite the fact that I knew the photograph had been taken in the sixties, it
seemed that these people could have been frozen in their poses at any time
over the previous hundred years. There was something timeless about them and
their belief in the possibility of escape, twenty people in simple clothes
dreaming of a utopia dedicated to the greater glory of the Lord. According to
a small caption, the land for the community had been granted to them by the
owner, himself a religious man, for the sum of $1 per acre per annum, paid in
advance for the term of the lease. By moving so far north the congregation's
privacy was virtually guaranteed. The nearest town was Eagle Lake to the
north, but it was then already in decline, the mills closing and the
population depleted. Tourism would eventually rescue the area but, in 1963,
Faulkner and his followers would have been left largely to their own devices.
I turned my attention to the Fellowship's pamphlet. It was basically one long
sales pitch designed to elicit the appropriate response from any readers:
namely, to hand over all of the loose change they might have on their person
at the time, plus any spare cash that might be making their bank statements
look untidy. There was an interesting medieval illustration on the front,
depicting what looked like the Last Judgment: horned demons tore at the naked
bodies of the damned while God looked on from above, surrounded by a handful
of presumably very relieved good folk. I noticed that the damned outnumbered
the saved by about five to one. All things considered, those didn't look like
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