Page 54 of The Instruments of Darkness

CHAPTER XXXIV

Five-year-old Verona Walters went missing from Mill Park in Augusta, Maine, on a bright July day in 2015. She and her father, Chris, had been playing hide-and-seek among the bushes and trees, and Chris had turned his back on her while he counted down from ten to one. In reality, he’d been peeking, unwilling to let his daughter out of his sight, but she caught him looking and instructed him to cover his eyes properly. Later, he would tell detectives that he couldn’t have had his back to her for more than three or four seconds, five tops, before he went searching. By then, she was already gone.

What followed was one of the most high-profile missing persons cases in the Northeast’s living memory, extending first statewide and subsequently into the contiguous regions. The police conducted hundreds of interviews and followed up every possible lead and sighting, however tenuous or improbable. Dogs searched the banks of the Kennebec, boats worked their way up and down its length, and divers explored its depths. Known sex offenders were made to account for their movements. Weeks went by, then months, but no trace of Verona Walters was found.

Inevitably, a number of self-proclaimed mediums came forward, claiming to have received messages either from Verona or from spirits with insights into her fate. Interventions of this kind presented problems for police because they had to be treated with seriousness, even at the risk of investigators being mocked. Leads came in all forms, and who was to say that a “vision” might not be a buried memory, a minor detail witnessed and then forgotten, only to resurface in an altered form?

But there was also the fear that a lead dismissed because of its source might turn out to be accurate, even if only accidentally: the medium who claims a child is in a river, weeks before a body is pulled from the muddy bed; or the psychic who talks of glimpsing a wood or glade in winter, only for the spring thaw to reveal infant bones among pine roots. The result, if those reports had been ignored, was that the police might end up being hauled over hot coals for their narrow-mindedness, and upbraided for prolonging a family’s agony. At the same time, to follow up such claims too quickly or publicly risked appearing desperate or excessively credulous.

Sabine Drew didn’t call the line dedicated to the Verona Walters case. Neither did she send a note or an email, but instead turned up at Augusta PD headquarters on Union Street and asked to speak with Ronnie Pascal, the lead detective on the case. Pascal was off duty when Drew arrived, so Drew was asked if she’d care to deal with one of the other officers involved. She refused. She would, she said, talk only with Pascal.

Ronnie Pascal lived a ten-minute drive from the center of Augusta and wasn’t doing a whole lot that day, so he agreed to come in. Sabine Drew asked if they could sit somewhere private, and he showed her to an empty interview room. He offered her coffee, but she requested water instead. By the time Pascal returned with the bottle, Drew had placed a hand-drawn map on the table.

“What’s this?” asked Pascal.

“A map, obviously,” said Drew. “It’s where Verona Walters is buried.”

A reply of that sort might lead any detective worth his salt to wonder if he should begin recording the conversation after asking the person sitting opposite if they were waiving the right to an attorney. Ronnie Pascal did none of those things, not yet, because he’d spent too long dealing with a great many people who professed to have intelligence relating to the whereabouts of Verona Walters, a not inconsiderable proportion of whom had been wrong, deluded, or actively mischief-making.

“And how do you know that?” said Pascal.

“Because she told me.”

“Told you how?”

But Drew answered a different question.

“In my kitchen yesterday morning, shortly after breakfast.”

Ronnie Pascal was tempted to ask Drew what she’d been cooking and how strong the fumes might have been. He was a confirmed atheist who made a point of walking under ladders and was proud to have been born on the thirteenth day of the month. For this reason, he tried to leave the interviews with mediums and similar wingnuts to his colleagues, liberating him from having to mask a skepticism that curdled too quickly into contempt. Now he realized that here was time he could happily have been whiling away at home.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I’m happy to listen to whatever you have to say,” Pascal lied, “but I also have to warn you against wasting police time.”

“She told me to ask for you specifically.”

“Why? Because she saw me on TV?”

“No, because she met you once.”

Pascal had been tapping his pen on his notebook—nib first, then top, twisting it between his fingers, distracting himself with the pattern. Now he stopped. This was not common knowledge. Two years previously, he had called by the Walters house to take a witness statement from the father about an armed robbery at a bank on Senator Way. Verona Walters was then three years old. She’d shown him one of her dolls.

“Where did you hear that?”

“From Verona. You handled one of her dolls. She told you the doll’s name. Do you remember it?”

“Yes.”

“Carly, right?”

Ronnie Pascal had heard of people getting chills down their spines. He’d even experienced it himself once or twice, but only in the company of violent, unrepentant men. He had never before felt it while sitting across from a mild-mannered, unexceptional-looking woman with a hole in the right elbow of her cardigan.

“Yes, that was the doll’s name,” he said. “But with respect, there are other ways you could have found it out.”

“Yes, I suppose there are.” She didn’t sound remotely offended. “I might be a friend of the family, although I’m not. I could have heard about it from one of your fellow officers, but I have no intimates in the Augusta PD. I only know the police in Haynesville, where I live.”

She concentrated, assembling her thoughts.

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