Page 73 of The Instruments of Darkness

He raised the glass.

“Then it’s an apt way to celebrate his life,” she said.

Clark took a sip of the Lagavulin and rolled it in his mouth. It brought to mind Gary Champine, with his too-white teeth and his too-tight suits, his $200 haircuts and his collection of showy watches. Champine had died in the ambulance, the last of the four to give up the ghost. Clark hoped he’d suffered.

“?‘Celebrate,’?” he said. “Yes, that’s the word.”

CHAPTER XLVII

Sabine Drew had never wanted to be on TV or pointed at by strangers on the street. She didn’t enjoy reporters calling so often that she and her mother were forced to contemplate changing their phone numbers and locking the gates to their home. Most of all, she had no desire to answer questions about the events that had led to the arrest of Lester Boulier, but the detective, Ronnie Pascal, had been forced to reveal her involvement in the case. Even though he’d done his best to obfuscate and withhold, he’d still shared more with the media than Sabine would have preferred.

And it wasn’t only reporters and TV crews who had beaten a path to her door after Edie Brook’s body was found. No, the oddballs arrived too, and the religious lunatics, the crazies who were convinced she had a personal hotline to God. A few had grown angry when she denied it, as though she were electing to hide matters of import that she had a divine obligation to share, while others whispered it was not from God that her gifts came, and the living had no business consorting with the dead.

But they weren’t even the worst, not by a long shot. The sad and the desperate contacted her, some of them traveling hundreds of miles to plead for help. The poorest came by bus, their clothes wrinkled and bearing the marks of ablutions at rest stops and gas stations, their sustenance carried in vacuum flasks and Tupperware containers now empty after hard journeys. They brought with them photos, mementos, items of jewelry, single shoes, locks of hair—even, in one case, a glass eye, perhaps in the hope that she might be able to turn her gaze to the next world and identify its owner by an empty socket. They wished to be told that all was well, that they were remembered, loved, forgiven, and awaited. They sought the location of wills, cashboxes, and keys to safe deposit boxes. They asked why, where, with whom, by whom, and of whom. Their need was endless.

And then there were the ones who sought the missing, who were uncertain as to whether they should be searching among the living or the dead: husbands, wives, siblings, parents, and children who had vanished without explanation. Those left behind sought closure, an end to their own suffering and nightmares of the ongoing agonies of their loved ones. Those who had lost children endured greater depths of torment, being additionally burdened with guilt at their failure to protect them.

In the beginning, Sabine tried to assist as many as she could, but most went away disappointed. She couldn’t make them understand that seeking answers from the dead was as hard as obtaining them from the living—harder, indeed, because the former far outnumbered the latter, and spoke in a different tongue. Even Verona Walters had become less intelligible to Sabine in the final moments before her body was revealed, and all communication between them ceased forever. Also, by questing, Sabine drew attention; when the dead saw her light and felt her presence, they were drawn like moths. If she foraged among them, she had to do so without revealing too much of herself. It was like exploring a deep darkness with the aid of a flashlight that could only be used intermittently.

But now and again, she had successes: a sighting, however partial; a reply, however imperfectly understood. There was never closure, because closure was a myth, but the sum of unhappiness was marginally decreased and the agony of unknowing lessened. Yet the cost to Sabine was considerable. She struggled to eat and sleep. Her mouth festered with ulcers. Her hair began to fall out. Finally, she collapsed and was taken, first to the local clinic, then to Millinocket Regional, but even there she was not safe. Patients and visitors came to her, as well as apologetic doctors and nurses. She woke one night to find a man with pancreatic cancer kneeling by her bedside. He had placed her hand on his head and was praying for her to heal him. He was still thanking her for what she could not do as the orderlies ushered him gently away.

After she was discharged, she put an end to the visits and the calls. A remote-locking system replaced the old gates, and a fence was erected around the yard. For a while, the more persistent still succeeded in overcoming these obstacles, but the local police were always available to escort them from the property, with a stern lecture about the consequences of trespassing.

But Sabine continued to aid investigators when she could. They contacted her circumspectly, some embarrassed at being forced to resort to such a measure, although she did not judge them for their discomfiture. To the police, as with the general public, she could not always be of much use, but again, there were small triumphs, little victories. Each involved a child. Children were easier to locate because their light shone brighter. Quietly, Sabine began to gain a reputation among law enforcement. One thing could be said of her: she did not lie.

And then came Edie Brook.

CHAPTER XLVIII

Edie Brook was eight years old when she disappeared from the Maine Mall in South Portland. Her mother, Andie, was in the men’s section at Macy’s, picking up some jeans on special for her husband, who swore he still wore 34-34 Levi 501s, if only in his dreams. Yes, he could fit into them, but barely, and had to wear his shirts untucked to disguise the resulting muffin top. Meanwhile, to sit comfortably required him leaving open the top button for a time until the jeans bedded in, or risk taking someone’s eye out when it popped. Men, Andie Brook reflected, were the vainest creatures on earth this side of a peacock. Her husband hated the mall, so she’d offered to buy the jeans for him, with the ulterior motive of picking up 36-34 501s and slipping them into his closet. He was unlikely to check the size, but on the off-chance that he did, she thought she might use a pin or a pen to deface it.

So these were her thoughts as she compared shades of blue in the artificial light of the store. She looked around and couldn’t see her daughter. She didn’t take fright, not immediately, because the store was a maze of racks, and Edie liked playing hide-and-seek among them, or pretending she was Dora the Explorer trying to stop Swiper from stealing stuff. Lord knows, the folks at Macy’s might even have been willing to pay her by the hour, the amount of merchandise that must have been shoplifted every day.

Jeans in hand, Andie had begun hunting for her daughter, even as a nasty feeling slowly began to take hold. She had an ache in her stomach, like she really needed to get to a restroom, and her mouth tasted sour. She called Edie’s name, louder and louder, until finally she was screaming it, which brought staff and security running. The store was searched, the effort rippling outward to take in the mall and its parking lot. The police arrived, followed by her husband. He’d left their two older boys with his mom, but by then Andie was only just managing to hold it together. The sight of him, and his solicitude toward her, caused her to break. She folded slowly to the floor, taking a display of Florsheim shoes with her, and wanted to die.

No trace of Edie Brook could be found. Security footage showed her by the exit in the men’s section, leaning out of the open door. She appeared to be talking to someone outside, although there was no external store camera covering that particular angle, so whomever she was conversing with might deliberately have chosen the spot, like a hunter picking the best stand from which to target prey. Finally, after a few seconds of conversation, Edie could be seen departing the store, her arms extended as though to hug someone. That was the final sighting of her.

An AMBER Alert was issued. The main external cameras in the mall parking lot, which ordinarily would have given a view of the doors, had been obscured by an illegally parked truck at the time of Edie’s disappearance, but three other vehicles, including a panel van, had stopped briefly during the window established for what was now being treated as an abduction. The drivers of the truck and the two cars were quickly traced, because all were still on mall property, but the van, a dark blue 1990 Ford Falcon XF, was not. The police started tracking it, using adjacent cameras to establish its exit route from the mall, and came up with a license number, but the plate and vehicle didn’t match, because the plate should have been attached to a silver Town & Country.

Twenty minutes later, a report was received of a vehicle on fire in a disused lot over in North Deering. The vehicle in question was a Ford panel van, its blue paint already almost completely scorched away by the heat of the flames. Hanging from a nearby tree was Edie Brook’s yellow rain jacket.

After that, the trail went dead, despite repeated searches of the area, tearful appeals from Edie’s parents, and a $75,000 reward from a local businessman for information leading to her safe return. The reward was as much a hindrance as a help, because the promise of easy money lured lowlifes and scoundrels, any number of psychics among them: some fake, others sincere, and all wrong.

One week after the vanishing of Edie Brook, Sabine Drew began hearing her voice. It came to her at the same time each day, just before 4 p.m., asking for a glass of grape juice and an Oreo. Sabine was still in mourning for her mother, who had passed away a few months earlier. The voice was, in its way, a welcome distraction from her grief. After three days of listening to it, and some tentative reaching out to the source, Sabine approached the South Portland PD, a force she had not previously assisted. Calls were made, one of them to Ronnie Pascal, and assurances received about Sabine’s bona fides. She ended up sitting in another police interview room—different, but the same—and told them what she knew.

“I think Edie’s alive,” she said.

“How do you know?” asked the lead detective, a man named Wilbert Sullivan whose attitude Sabine didn’t care for, not one bit. She could tell he didn’t trust her and gave no credence to a word she had to say. Short of being marched into the interview room at gunpoint, he couldn’t have looked unhappier at being there, but it wasn’t as though he and his colleagues were doing so well without her help. Edie was still missing, and parents in the area were one scare away from cuffing their kids to their wrists. Sullivan’s demeanor probably caused Sabine to present herself more forcefully than was her norm.

“I can tell the difference between the living and the dead,” she snapped. “Can’t you?”

“We’ve had some experience of it, yes,” said the man seated next to Sullivan, another detective, this one named Cogan. He was less hostile than his partner, which wouldn’t have been hard.

A woman, who had been standing in the shadows but not yet introduced, stepped forward.

“This is unfamiliar territory for us, Ms. Drew,” she said. “We try to treat all offers of assistance with respect, but we’ve already wasted a lot of time on false leads, some of them from individuals claiming to have certain… gifts.”

“You have the advantage of me,” said Sabine. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

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