Chapter XXXV

It was odd, Sabine Drew reflected, how the extraordinary could so quickly come to seem quotidian. In the beginning, once she'd stopped being frightened of the figures that drifted through the shadow landscape of her life, she became, quite naturally, fascinated by them. It was like watching some rare, pale species of fish inhabiting, however briefly, a dark exorheic region, destined to remain in place only for as long as it took to locate the egress stream leading to the sea. Like fish, the dead had to be treated carefully, and were similarly alert to observation—though, unlike fish, they favored approaching the observer. The departed, in addition to being dull, were easily distracted.

But having them draw close was an unpleasant experience. They didn't smell bad, or not usually, but there was an undeniable miasma about them, a fog of confusion, even despair. Sabine found extended exposure to it debilitating, as though they were draining some of the life from her to compensate for their own absence of vitality; and it was worse when they tried to touch her, because even a gentle stroke from one of them was painful, though it left no visible mark.

And they had such need: for answers, reassurance, companionship. The younger they were, the more profound it was. She learned that early on when, without thinking, she reached out to comfort a boy of three or four with burns along the entire right side of his body. His face was such a mask of misery and remembered agony that she had felt compelled to offer succor.

Five days later, he was still there. He followed her to school and church. He was the first sight to greet her in the morning and the last she took with her when she closed her eyes at night. She never even discovered his name, because he never spoke. She felt sorry for him for the first day or two, but then he grew annoying. She began to worry that he might never leave and she would be stuck with him unto the grave and beyond, because she had no doubt that he'd be waiting for her on the other side as well. Finally, in a fit of desperation, she had called out to a middle-aged woman leading two little girls by the hand. All three were wet, and the left side of the woman's face was caved in, but none gave any sign of being troubled. The woman paused when Sabine spoke, and her one good eye drifted in confusion from the boy to Sabine before she realized what was being asked of her. The younger of the girls tried to run to Sabine and the boy, but her mother held on tight to her.

Thank goodness, thought Sabine. I already have enough problems with one lost child. I don't need another.

The girl, recognizing that she was not about to be released, extended her hand to the burnt boy, but he would not move.

"Go on," said Sabine. "They'll take care of you."

The boy raised his arms to her.

"No," she said. "I don't want to play with you anymore."

She didn't feel bad about rejecting him. It was for his own good, and she really was tired of having him around. For an instant, tiny fires of rage ignited in his eyes, and Sabine could have sworn that the burn marks on his body glowed red. Then he dropped his arms, turned his back, and went to join the woman and her daughters. He took the younger girl's hand and the quartet faded from view. The boy did not once look back.

"Well," Sabine said aloud, as he vanished, "there's gratitude."

Still, it was a lesson she took to heart. She grew adept at surveying the dead, at regarding without being noticed. She aided them when and where she could, but kept her distance unless her sense of disorder, of wrongness, became too acute. In those situations, her appetite and sleep patterns would become affected. Her skin would grow dry and itchy. She might even get ulcers in her mouth. It was no surprise that she preferred not to involve herself, but the Verona Walters case was one instance where she felt she had no option but to help.

Sabine had seated herself at the kitchen table, the newspaper photograph of Verona before her, and asked her mother not to disturb her for an hour or two. The latter, by now familiar with her daughter's ways, left her alone, even going so far as to turn off the radio in the living room and temporarily halting her never-ending cleaning of the old house. In the stillness that followed, Sabine had reached out to the dead girl.

RONNIE PASCAL SHIFTED INhis chair. He was trying to find a comfortable position, but was beginning to fear that he never would, not while he was in the company of this woman.

"You appreciate how unlikely all this sounds?" he said.

"Of course. Do you really think I wanted to come here just to have you look at me like I'm insane? I could have stayed home and kept all this to myself."

"Why didn't you?"

"Is that a serious question?"

"No," said Pascal, "I guess not."

He examined again the notes he'd made and came to a decision. It went against all his beliefs, but not, oddly, against his instincts. He would treat this woman as a potential witness, and approach her testimony as he had that of the others who had come forward to help with the case. After all, what harm could it do? Pascal took off his jacket and told her to call him Ronnie. She, in turn, asked him to call her by her first name.

"Sabine, you say that Verona told you that the man who abducted her smelled," he said. "Did she mention how? You know, was he sweaty, or unwashed?"

"She said he smelled of garbage."

"Garbage?"

"Like the inside of a trash can."

Something tickled Pascal unpleasantly, like a bug on his skin preparing to bite.

"What else did she notice? What about his hands?"

"He wore gloves. She saw them when he took her. He smothered her mouth to stop her from screaming."

"What kind of gloves?"

Sabine didn't even pause.

"Green, but a dirty green. Hard-wearing, with padded fingers. A workman's gloves. They, too, smelled bad."

"You're very sure of that," said Pascal.

"Not I. Verona."

"Well, someone has good recall, down to small details."

"Aren't small details important in a case like this?"

"All details are important."

"Well, there you are. I remember everything Verona told me. Don't you think you'd remember all that a dead girl said to you?"

"I can't say I've ever had the experience."

"You should count yourself lucky."

Sabine rummaged in her purse, produced a packet of tissues, and blew her nose noisily.

"Excuse me," she said. "Allergies."

When she was done, she carefully placed the used tissue in a plastic Ziploc bag before sanitizing her hands. Years later, with the coming of COVID-19, such actions would become unremarkable. To Pascal, at this time, they only added to the woman's eccentricity.

"You still doubt me," she said. "I don't blame you—honestly, I don't—but it will become very tedious before too long. So why don't we just take it as given that you'll treat everything I say with a degree of skepticism, and therefore you won't have to keep expressing it aloud or by grimacing?"

If she was a fruit loop, as Pascal remained tempted to believe, she was at least a self-possessed, self-aware one. And there was that business about the abductor's odor—

"What else did she tell you?" he asked. "Did she see a vehicle?"

"Verona thinks it was a cream car, or perhaps yellow. She was panicking, so she can't be sure. He put her facedown in the trunk and covered her head. When she kept struggling, he hit her—not too hard, but enough to subdue her. Then he tied her hands behind her back, and bound her legs."

"And in all that time, she didn't get a look at his face?"

"He was wearing sunglasses, and a scarf wrapped across his mouth. Then the hood went on."

"Anything else about the car?"

"It smelled much the way he did."

"Like garbage?"

"Yes, like garbage."

Pascal made another note, although it wasn't necessary. He knew he was procrastinating. He didn't yet want to progress to the next stage: the death of the girl. He was a father himself, of two daughters. One could not be both empathic and objective, and only the latter would serve any purpose here.

"You're hesitant to ask about what happened next, aren't you?" Sabine asked. "Even though we need to talk more about how she died, or what happened after."

"You ought to be a psychologist."

"Maybe I am, in my way."

"For the living, I mean."

"Oh, generally the living are even less interesting than the dead," she said. "Who'd want to listen to their problems, even at payment by the hour? Leastways the dead have real cause for complaint."

That, thought Pascal, was undeniable.

"You know you share a name with a philosopher?"

"Yeah. The wager guy."

"Our lives are a bet on the existence or nonexistence of God," said Sabine, "or so he posited. I take you as a batter for the nonexistence team."

"You take me right."

"Have you ever heard of Pyrrho?"

"Can't say that I have. Was he Pascal's older brother?"

"Hardly, not unless he was unusually long-lived. He was a Greek philosopher, among the earliest skeptics—although one unlike yourself, skepticism being an oft-misused term."

Pascal realized he'd just been given a ticking-off, even if he couldn't have said exactly how, or why.

"Pyrrho," continued Sabine, "believed that one should suspend judgment on non-evident propositions—the existence of gods, for instance, or ghosts—because there can be no truth to them, only arguments for and against. You should consider my testimony as an argument ‘for.'?"

"And what do I set against it?"

"Whatever you choose."

"Results?"

She thought about this.

"Results might do it, though you could ascribe them to coincidence if it made you feel better about the whole business." She sniffed, and rummaged for another tissue. "I ought to read more philosophy, but there are only so many hours in the day. I was more invested when I was younger, in the hope that it might assist me in understanding my responsibilities, but either I wasn't smart enough or the philosophers weren't. Then again, it may be that we were equally at fault."

She stopped talking and waited expectantly for him to resume, as though their exchange should have put an end to any reasons he might have had for further hesitation.

"You said—" He corrected himself. "Verona said that he choked her to death."

"Once more, she doesn't think it was his intention, but that's what it amounts to. She managed to get her hands free while she was in the trunk and attacked him when he unlocked the lid. He took hold of her throat to restrain her and fractured something inside. There's a little bone—"

"The hyoid," said Pascal.

"Yes, that's it. I had to read up on it, but you just knew. That's impressive, although it bespeaks experience I'm glad I don't have. It seems the hyoid is very delicate, especially in children, or am I mistaken?"

"No, you're correct."

"Then that may be what he broke inside her. Afterward, he buried her."

"Was his face still obscured when he popped the trunk?"

"Yes, but in the moment before he could react, Verona caught sight of those aspects of the landscape that I've reproduced on paper for you."

"Which brings us to the map."

It resembled a sketch a child might have created, and Pascal experienced an absurd temptation to ask Sabine if, in fact, Verona herself might have been responsible. He saw a pen moving of its own volition while Sabine watched. He waited until the image had passed before continuing, even as he wondered if exposure to this woman was somehow polluting his rationalism. He was also, he had to admit, still smarting about that Pyrrho crack.

"I concede," said Drew, "that my artistic skills leave much to be desired."

"Did Verona describe this scene to you?"

"Not exactly. Some of it she described, and some she… showed me."

"Showed?"

"It's like a camera flash going off in a dark space, except the image is blurred. Like so much else, it's hard to explain."

"So what did you see in this flash?"

"Trees. Dirt. Sky. Parts of those two buildings or houses, but only briefly."

"Do you remember anything about them, anything that might distinguish them: numbers, a name on a mailbox?"

Sabine closed her eyes. Pascal waited, the second hand on his watch counting off almost a minute.

"A blue door on one," she said at last, "the one to the left. Junk in the yard, but I can't be sure what kind. And—"

She frowned in concentration.

"There was a shape hanging from one of the trees, like someone had strung up a deer to be skinned, but it wasn't that."

Pascal did not speak. What she was telling him could not possibly be true, but he wished it to be so. He wanted desperately for her not to be a fake or a crazy, while at the same time needing her to be wrong—not only for the sake of his own convictions about the nature of this world but also for the Walters family.

Because if Sabine Drew was right, their daughter was dead.

"Look harder," said Pascal. "Take your time."

She opened her eyes again.

"You know what it is, don't you?"

"I just want to be clear about everything," he replied neutrally.

She huffed at his intransigence before reclosing her eyes. Her body relaxed, even as Pascal grew tenser. Was this some kind of psychic trance? Was she summoning the spirit of Verona Walters here, to this interview room? Would the air turn cold? Would Pascal hear his dead great-grandmother tell him where she'd hidden the family treasure transported from France by her ancestors, a running joke in the clan since it certainly amounted to no more than a couple of silver spoons and a bag of centimes? Was Ronnie Pascal, for the first time to his knowledge, about to be exposed to the presence of the uncanny?

Sabine unlidded one eye.

"In case you're wondering, this isn't a séance. It's just easier to concentrate without visual or auditory distractions."

"The thought hadn't even crossed my mind."

"Liar."

Pascal could hear someone speaking outside the interview room door and the ringing of a cell phone. He found that he was forcing himself not to think of the yard, like a gambler at a carnival sideshow who'd wagered a dollar that the mind reader couldn't guess the nature of the animal he'd been told to visualize. But even as he tried, the trees became clearer to him, and he saw what had been suspended from the lowest branch of an oak, the weight keeping it unmoving despite the breeze.

"It's a punching bag," said Sabine Drew, her eyes still shut, "a brown leather punching bag. It's been there for a long time: the grass beneath has been worn away by the movement of feet. There's a strap around the branch, then a carabiner hook, and finally a chain leading to the bag itself. The links are a bit rusty, but still solid."

She opened her eyes.

"You've seen it," she said. "You know where it is. You know who he is, the one who took her."

Pascal released the breath he'd been holding.

"Ms. Drew—" he began.

"Sabine."

"Sabine. Again, I'm obliged to advise you that if you've come by this information through some means other than those you're claiming, you should tell me now. Similarly, if this is some vendetta against a neighbor, or a guy who cut you off in the parking lot at Hannaford's, and you're manufacturing a story out of spite, I guarantee I'll have you jailed."

She did not reply, and her eyes never left his face. It was so quiet that he could hear the gentle ticking of his watch.

"Well?" he said.

"Sorry. I thought you were done, and had already figured out for yourself that I wasn't about to dignify it with a response."

Pascal gathered up his notes, adding the map to them.

"If you don't mind staying here a while longer," he said.

"Not at all. I do need to use the restroom, though, after which I will take you up on the offer of a coffee, and something sweet to go with it, if you can oblige me. My blood sugar is getting low."

"I'll send Officer Loscarso back in," said Pascal. "She'll show you to the restroom, and ensure that you're fed and watered."

"You make me sound like a horse."

"A thoroughbred, I hope."

"I hope so, too. However unlikely it may sound, I'm telling you the truth."

She stood and smoothed her skirt, a gesture more habitual than practical. Pascal didn't even want to guess when the skirt had last seen an iron. She placed a hand on his arm, the intimacy of the gesture the final step in his disarmament.

"Have you met him, the man who owns that punching bag?"

"Yes."

"What does he look like?"

"He looks like a regular guy."

"When you arrest him, remember that he didn't mean to kill Verona."

"But he did kill her."

"Yes," she said. She looked desperately sad. "A regular guy."

"You sound almost sorry for him."

"I suppose I am."

"Why?"

She blew her nose, and added the used tissue to the others in her Ziploc bag.

"Because," she said, "I have some inkling of what's waiting for him on the other side."