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."

"I usually hate that word, ‘frankly,' but I'm prepared to make an exception in your case because I don't doubt your essential probity."

"Perhaps we can set all this aside for a moment," I said. "Does it matter if I need time to consider the implications of what you're telling me?"

"Actually, it does. It's pertinent to the second reason I came here, and the whereabouts of Henry Clark."

"Go on," I said. "I'll try to keep an open mind."

I could sense her frustration. She'd emerged from seclusion to present her case to someone she hoped might be willing to listen, but the more she spoke, the less likely it seemed that its substance might be accepted. Yet she had come this far, and no purpose would be served by stopping before the end.

"The presence," she said, "the intelligence that misled me about Edie Brook, I've felt it again, for the first time in years."

"Where?"

"Gretton. I hear Henry Clark crying in the night, but behind it I can make out—well, I can only describe it as a sonic distortion, with the echo of a voice, a murmur, buried deep in its patterns. The last time I heard that murmur was when I thought I was in contact with Edie Brook."

"And for obvious reasons," I said, "you can't go to the police with this."

"They'd have even less reason to believe me than you do."

"And suppose I did believe you? I can tell you that I don't have the resources or the authority to go scouring Gretton for the body of a child. Even if you—or we—did manage to convince the police that Henry Clark might be there, based on whatever evidence was sufficient, any search would have to be narrowed to a manageable area."

"I know," she said. "I've had to explain in the past how hard it is for me to do that." She rubbed at her temples with her fingertips, her eyes squeezed closed as though enduring a headache. "But that's not the only difficulty I have with Gretton. You see, I drove to the town line, but couldn't go any farther."

"Why not?"

She looked up at me, her hands still cradling her head.

"I told you. I was afraid."

"Of whatever you think is there?"

She nodded.

"It's old. I can apprehend its antiquity. I think it sleeps for years, decades, but it always wakes hungry, and it likes the taste of children. It's feeding on Henry Clark now, eating his light, and when it's finally consumed the last of him, it'll hibernate again. This is a cycle, one that's persisted for a long, long time. When Henry succumbs, any hope we might have of locating it will be gone. By the time it wakes again, who knows, I could be dead. If I'm not, it may be that I won't hear the next child crying. Either way, the entity will survive, but the child won't."

"How did it get to Henry?" I asked.

"With help, I assume. Evil finds its own. It forms clusters."

She checked her watch.

"I'm tired," she said. "I don't often stay up this late, and I'm not used to people and bars. My brain feels as though it's being pricked with needles."

She rose and put on her coat, before remembering the check. She rummaged in her purse, crumpling bills in her hand as she counted them out.

"I'll take care of it," I said. "You came all this way, so it's the least I can do."

"You listened," she replied, "and that's the least you could have done, but I don't know what else I expected from you. To ride in like the cavalry with guns blazing, all on the word of a solitary woman who still claims to hear departed voices, even after she was denounced as a liar and a fraud? What was I thinking? Such foolishness."

She tossed some bills on the table and moved past me.

"Do you need a ride?" I asked.

"My car is outside and I have a place to stay in town." She paused, and her hand brushed my shoulder. "I hope your daughter finds peace, Mr. Parker. I hope you do, too. There just isn't enough of it—in this world, or the next."

And she gave herself to the night.