Page 27 of The Instruments of Darkness

“A conclusion to his marriage?”

“I handle divorces. Give him my card. There are simpler ways to get out of a bad relationship than trying to have your spouse jailed for infanticide. Speaking of which, the hearing is scheduled for four p.m. Think you can be at the courthouse by three thirty?”

“Whenever you need me.”

“Don’t make it sound creepy. So what next?”

“I’m going to talk to some of Colleen’s neighbors,” I said. “It’ll mean skipping our meeting in person later this morning, but since we’re already speaking, ringing doorbells might be a better use of my resources. I’m also of a mind to begin following up on Mara Teller, if I have time. Stephen Clark says he discussed the affair with the police, but either they didn’t feel it was a lead worth chasing down, or they didn’t make any headway when they tried. I’d like to find out what happened there.”

“Will they share?”

“I can ask. They can only say no. But that’s the official route. There are other ways.”

“I wish you luck,” he said. “By the way, professional loyalties aside, you didn’t much like our friend Stephen, did you?”

“He’s callous and vain. That’s a poor combination, although without the latter he probably wouldn’t have talked to me.”

“So he wanted to match wits?” said Moxie. “God bless his patience. Are you cutting him any slack for being a father who’s lost his child?”

“I would,” I said, “had he mentioned that child more often.”

Moxie was silent for so long that I thought the connection might have been lost.

“Let’s keep your opinion of him between us for now,” he said at last.

“I wasn’t planning on advertising it.”

“I meant keeping it from Colleen.”

“My lips are sealed. I’ll see you at three thirty.”

CHAPTER XVI

Far from the broodings of Kit No. 174—and those who guarded its secrets—a woman sat at the breakfast nook in her little cottage outside Haynesville, in the southeast corner of Aroostook County. The windows in the house were too small, so the rooms were always dim, but she didn’t mind. She had never courted sunlight and didn’t entertain visitors. In fact, for more than a decade she had been a virtual recluse, rarely venturing farther than the boundaries of her own town, unless health or business requirements dictated otherwise. Her name was Sabine Drew, and it had once, for a time, been known to many.

Sabine Drew’s kitchen looked out on the Haynesville Woods by Route 2A, long regarded as one of the most dangerous roads in the county. During icy weather, drivers unfamiliar with its reputation often took the hairpin turns too fast. If they were lucky, they ended up in a ditch; if they were unlucky, they ended up in a cemetery. Dick Curless, the Tumbleweed Kid—a son of Aroostook, and the state’s most famous country singer—even sang a song about Route 2A, “A Tombstone Every Mile.” Dick would have known the road, since he’d resorted to driving a lumber truck for a while when the music business wasn’t paying so well. Dick had probably taken those corners gently, though, what with him having poor vision and all. They took out most of Dick’s stomach in ’75, a year after he stopped drinking and a year before he found Jesus, but the cancer got him anyway. Old Death was like that, Sabine had found. You could dodge him, even skip ahead for a while, and Death would never hold it against you. He knew he’d cross paths with you again, and it wasn’t as though he didn’t have enough custom to keep him occupied in the meantime.

All sorts of stories were told about Route 2A: tales of phantom girls walking the stretch of road where they’d died under the wheels of a truck, and dead women screaming for lost husbands, but they were nonsense. Sabine had lived in Haynesville all her life, and she’d never seen a single phantom girl or solitary dead woman on that road. Different ghosts, certainly, but not those.

Not that she spoke of specters to anyone these days. She’d left all that behind. Occasionally, folk still sought her out, either from curiosity or because they needed help, but she sent them off as politely as she could. It was always harder with the latter than the former, since she might have been able to assist them if she tried. But it was better not to; it would only bring trouble, and more knocks on the door.

So she lived with ghosts—her own, and those of others—while trying not to pay them too much notice. They were always seeking attention, and if they got it, like the callers at her door, they’d never go away. In that sense, they also resembled children, which was perhaps why Sabine had never wished for any kids of her own, not that anyone had ever seriously raised the possibility of making some with her. She’d never entertained any illusions about her attractiveness. Her mother had advised Sabine that she was “homely,” the kindest word she could find, so even without her peculiarity, Sabine might have struggled to interest a man for the long haul, which was like saying that with a different head, she might have been enticing. Her strangeness was as much a part of her as her looks, so she figured she’d die unmarried, but not alone. If she ever wanted for company, she could just alter her gaze and a ghost would come.

But as had been established, it was better not to do that. She’d learned to excise them from her consciousness; or more correctly, to accommodate her consciousness to their presence, like an alarm that had been ringing for so long that it became part of the soundscape, and one ceased to be unduly bothered by it. Lately, though, something had changed. A child was crying, and wouldn’t stop.

Which was why Sabine, for the first time in many years, was opening herself up to one of the dead. In silence, in shadow, she reached out and waited for the connection to be made. When it came, she listened and consoled as best she could, before getting in her car and driving toward the source of the cries.

CHAPTER XVII

I spent a couple of fruitless hours approaching as many of Colleen Clark’s neighbors as I could, starting with the ones who didn’t appear to bear her any outright malice. Colleen had provided me with a comprehensive list of associates, casual acquaintances, and friends, but the latter were few, and far outnumbered by those she believed bore her some antipathy. Inevitably, I questioned some of the hostiles, too, because they couldn’t be ignored, and received responses varying from “Nothing to say” and “I already told the police all I know,” to “Get lost” and “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Unfortunately, even the obliging ones had little to share other than that Colleen and her husband were always polite but kept mainly to themselves, and none of them had ever spent longer inside the Clark home than it took to conduct a brief conversation, sometimes over coffee but more often not. After Henry’s birth, Colleen sometimes joined the younger mothers at Dougherty Field if the weather was good, and would sometimes take part in the weekly Mom & Kids breakfasts at the Crooked Mile Cafe on Milk Street, but she was an irregular attendee, and more of a listener than a talker.

“I liked her, though,” said a woman named Piper Hudson, who lived one street over from the Clarks on Bolton. “Once you got to know her, she was really sweet. I think she was just lacking in confidence. My sister struggles with an eating disorder, and I thought I saw some of that in Colleen, though we never discussed it in depth.”

Hudson was bouncing a one-year-old girl named Isabella in her arms. She had two other children, with a Colombian nanny to help take care of them, which struck me as a full-time job given the noise that was coming from inside the house. Their mother left me alone for a moment to hand Isabella over to the nanny before returning to the porch. She hadn’t asked me to step into the hall because she said it was quieter outside. From behind the door, I now heard the sound of three children competing to see who could scream loudest, should confirmation have been required.

“If you’d told me before the first was born that I’d get tired of the weight of a child in my arms, I’d have scolded you,” she said. “That novelty wore off the first time I went to bed with aching muscles and woke up the same way.”

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