Page 53 of The Instruments of Darkness

He raised his fresh glass of beer. “You pay the piper,” he said, “you call the tune.”

“I think Stephen Clark hasn’t been straight about his relationship with Teller, whoever she really is: not with you, not with me, and not with his wife. By being unfaithful, he’s demonstrated that he’s capable of deceit. He may even have become habituated to it.”

Steady Freddy sipped his beer.

“I’ve revised those odds,” he said.

“Already?”

“Yeah. I think I was mistaken earlier: seventy-thirty in favor of a conviction.”

“And there I was about to congratulate myself for opening your mind.”

Neither of us had to stress that our meeting should stay between ourselves, even though nothing major had been conceded or revealed on either side. Discretion was understood.

“I’ll see you around, Freddy.”

“That you will.”

As the server arrived to pick up the credit card receipt and his tip, Steady Freddy tapped him on the arm.

“Son,” he said, “I’d like you to send a manager my way. We need to have a conversation about avocado…”

PAULIE FULCI CALLED AS I started my car.

“I’m at the Bear,” he said. “I drove over to get takeout for Evelyn and Tony. You know how my brother likes the Angry Bird.”

The Angry Bird was a fried chicken sandwich loaded with Hellfire sauce, jalapeños, and blue cheese. Tony Fulci’s version was customized for him with a few added drops of something called Chilli Pepper Pete’s Dragon’s Blood Mega Hot Sauce. Moxie had tried it once, and spent the whole of the following day afraid to leave the house.

“Is there a problem?” I said. “If they’ve run out of hot sauce, I can’t help.”

“There’s a woman here,” said Paulie. “She was asking after you. She says she knows something about Henry Clark. She’s—”

He struggled to find the right description before settling for “strange.”

“Crazy strange?”

Just as I had expected the police to get around to a more extensive examination of the Clark property, I had also been anticipating the emergence of lunatics and self-promoters. Missing persons cases drew them like flies, but particularly those involving children. Paulie Fulci might not have been a trained psychiatrist, but he’d been around enough of them in his life, along with the folk they treated, to be able to spot signs of disturbance in others.

“I don’t think so,” said Paulie. “Or if she is, it’s the mellow sort.”

I heard a muffled voice from nearby.

“Wait a minute,” said Paulie. “Dave wants to speak to you.”

Moments later, Dave Evans came on the phone.

“It took me a while to figure out who she is, the woman waiting for you,” he said. “I knew the face was familiar, but it’s been a few years.”

“Well?” I said.

“It’s Sabine Drew.”

2

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

C. G. Jung, Address to the Society for Psychical Research, 1919

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