Page 75 of The Instruments of Darkness

“It’s almost as though she was never there.”

THE SEARCH OF PATTEN and the surrounding area continued: one day, two, three. Word leaked that the decision to devote so much manpower to Patten was the result of a tip-off, although police still declined to reveal the source. Sabine persisted in her efforts to restore contact with Edie, but it was only at night that she now heard her, and even then she could not be entirely sure she was not dreaming. In the dark, between sleeping and waking, Edie told her that the man holding her captive had become anxious. She thought she’d heard sirens in the distance, as well as the shouts of men and the howling of dogs.

Then daylight would come, causing Edie to fall quiet again.

ON THE FINAL DAY of the Patten search, and two hundred miles to the southeast, a woman named Myrna Liddie was rowing in Scarborough Marsh with her granddaughter Erika, Myrna’s American water spaniel Chloe seated between them in the canoe. As they rounded a bend in the channel, Chloe, as was her wont, dove into the water and swam toward a clump of reeds. Myrna expected to see a duck ascend, quacking in panic, but no bird flew, and Chloe was content to circle the same spot. Unusually for her, she did not return when called, but instead began barking at her mistress. Myrna instructed her granddaughter to help steer the canoe toward the dog.

The clump of reeds lay close to the margin between high and low marsh. The areas of high marsh had been growing fewer and fewer each year due to rising sea levels. Soon, it was suggested, half the ecosystem would be underwater.

“Ugh!” said her granddaughter. The reeds were alive with European green crabs.

Myrna could see that Chloe had been drawn by what looked like the top of an old sack that had broken the surface of the water. It was crawling with crabs. Gingerly, Myrna touched it with the tip of her oar. It felt solid, and was shaped like a ball. Using the oar, she traced the lineaments of the form below the water until she could reach no farther.

“What is it, Grandma?” asked her granddaughter, but Myrna was already dialing 911.

“Get Chloe back in the canoe,” she said, as her emergency call was answered. “My name is Myrna Liddie,” she told the dispatcher. “I think I may have found a body in Scarborough Marsh.”

EDIE BROOK HAD BEEN in the water for a couple of days, but dead for more than a week. She had been placed in a sack bound with a length of chain. The chain was padlocked to a concrete block before the whole was dumped. Had her killer taken the time to pierce the corpse, preventing the accumulation of gas, she might not have been found, or not so soon, but detectives speculated that whoever put her in the water had wanted her to be discovered: there were better places to hide the body of a young girl than a tidal marsh.

As soon as the remains were identified, questions were asked about the lead that had brought the police not to Scarborough, but to Patten. Sabine’s involvement was made public, although by whom was never established. The denunciations came thick and fast. She was a fraud, an attention-seeker, an exploiter of the sorrow of others. Perhaps, some whispered, she might even have killed Edie Brook herself and used Patten as a diversion. Nobody involved in the case really believed this, but they didn’t have to: Sabine’s reputation and character lay in tatters within twenty-four hours of her being named in media reports. She was spat on in the street and her car was set alight. Her mailbox was filled with abusive letters and boxes of dog excrement. Someone sent her a .30-06 Springfield bullet on which her initials had been written in Wite-Out.

She stopped leaving the house. Her groceries arrived by special delivery. Neighbors grew reluctant to interact with her, and a handful would never speak to her again. Police no longer sought her help with investigations, though she continued to receive missives from those looking for the lost, but only the most despairing. She ignored them all, until, at last, they slowed to a trickle before drying up entirely.

She still saw the dead, though.

And sometimes, the dead saw her.

CHAPTER XLIX

The cups and glasses on the table before us stood empty. Much of Sabine Drew’s story was already known to me, but some of it was unfamiliar. I had not known that Sharon Macy was involved in the Edie Brook case. After a false start some years earlier, Macy and I had begun seeing each other again. I wondered how she would take the news that Edie’s specter had found its way to my door.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“Two reasons,” said Sabine. “The first is that I want you to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“That I’m not a liar, whatever anyone might say. I’ve just shared with you the worst experience of my life. I failed Edie Brook, but not willfully. My flaw was arrogance, which was exploited.”

“By whom? The police?”

“No. By something else.”

“?’something’?” There was that word again.

She sighed in the manner of a schoolmistress faced with a slow child.

“Mr. Parker, I was convinced that the voice I heard was Edie Brook’s. Even now, I remain certain that it was she who spoke to me, at least in the beginning. I couldn’t have manufactured that detail about the cookies and grape juice at four o’clock each afternoon, and it wasn’t anything that had been shared with the media. But I believe something else was listening, something that didn’t want me looking for lost children. It saw its chance to deal with the threat I posed and took it.”

“Are you saying that this entity imitated Edie Brook to disgrace you?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It may even be that this entity was not unknown to whomever took Edie, or was working through them. Then again, they may not have even been aware of it. Whatever the truth, I’m convinced that it used Edie’s disappearance to manipulate and, as you say, disgrace me.”

I had heard and witnessed a great many strange things in my life. I was a man whose dead daughter spoke not only to him but also to his living child. I had been present in a church in England when the boundaries between worlds grew thin enough to fracture, and had stared into the face of the God of Wasps. Why, then, was Sabine Drew’s tale too rich for my blood? I could not have said, other than that it is one thing to accept the evidence of one’s own eyes and ears—although even then, the mind may try to convince one otherwise—but another to embrace without reservation the convictions of another. I tried to keep my face neutral, but she could see that I was struggling to accept the truth of her claim.

“You think I’m deluded, don’t you?”

“Frankly, I don’t know what to think.”

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