Chapter 44
Sabine Drew arrived in Bingham shortly after noon.
The town was quiet, but it was hard to imagine it any other way, except in the height of summer, and even then only as a throughway.
Bingham was a functional community: three or four churches, some schools, a NAPA auto parts, a Dollar General—because where would the poor be without a Dollar General?
—a few gas stations with convenience stores, and because this was the new Maine, a cannabis dispensary.
Faded signs on deserted or boarded-up buildings whispered of a departed Bingham with more appetite for the inessential and a supply to meet the demand.
They reminded Sabine of the names found on stones, or beneath pale pictures of the dead.
Thanks to the newspaper reports about Mallory Norton’s disappearance, and aided by a Google search at the Inn at St John, she had in her notebook the location of the building supplies premises owned by Mallory’s father, Todd “T. K.” Norton, as well as the address of the family home and much else besides, including prizes won by Mallory in middle and high school, both athletic and academic, and a selection of the more interesting comments about her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
(Sabine would never call it X, not as long as breath remained in her body.) She had also assembled a short list of Mallory’s employers since leaving school, which included the family business.
Like a lot of residents in that part of the state, notably the younger ones who either opted to stay or felt they had no choice due to family commitments, Mallory Norton worked a couple of jobs, depending on the season: part-time hours for her father in late winter and spring, combined with shifts at a gas station or restaurant, or packing shelves as far south as Solon or Madison; but in the summer, when the tourists flooded the region and all the resorts and camps were scrambling for staff, she had greater latitude.
She might still work two jobs, though out of choice rather than necessity, because what she earned would help her through any lean periods to follow.
The opportunities tailed off some in hunting season, but the crossover with the winter sports crowd meant she could still bring in good money from waitressing through January or so.
After that, it was a few months of hardscrabble.
Sabine was building a picture of the girl.
This, she reflected, was not dissimilar to how the private investigator operated, though with a different aim.
He would be looking for clues, but Sabine was looking for traces, like the scent offered to a dog before a search, just as the men and women who had scoured the Kennebec Valley for Mallory Norton might have done with their hounds.
It wasn’t enough for Sabine to arrive in a place, clear her mind, and wait for the dead to present themselves in the hope of identifying the one among them that interested her.
That would be like opening the sluice gate on a dam and expecting to catch a single drop of water in one’s mouth.
For her to be of any help, filters were required.
Right now, Sabine had no sense of Mallory beyond what she’d read, which was why she’d driven to Bingham.
She wanted to walk the streets the girl walked, see what she saw, hear what she heard, and smell what she smelled.
She would stop by T. K. Norton’s place of business and pass by the school, even go inside if it was open.
Should anyone ask what she was doing, she might tell the truth, but more probably she would lie, inventing a daughter, a niece, the child of a friend, who might soon be relocating to the area.
Finally, she would visit the street where the young woman lived and seek to enter her home, where all that was Mallory was so much more present.
Of course, the Nortons might not appreciate a stranger arriving on their doorstep unannounced to spend time in their missing daughter’s bedroom.
Even if they knew who Sabine was, there was no guarantee they’d welcome her, but it would not be the first time she had invited herself into a situation rather than wait for an invitation to be proffered, and in common with the investigator, she understood the value of tenacity.
Sabine first went to T. K. Norton’s warehouse and store where, on a small table inside the door, a votive candle was burning next to a framed photograph of the missing girl.
Pinned to the table was a laminated notice containing a physical description of Mallory, when she was last seen, and contact numbers for the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office and the Maine State Police.
Sabine placed the palms of her hands on the reception desk on the pretense of inquiring if the store had a restroom she might use.
She would also have liked to touch the chair behind the desk, or even to have sat in it, but it wasn’t really the kind of thing a visitor could ask of a receptionist.
She then went to Valley High School (“Home of the Cavaliers”), a redbrick building with tidy lawns and sports fields in the rear.
The doors were all locked, the fields unoccupied, and she saw no one around who might have been persuaded to let her explore further.
At the front door, beside a sign requesting that visitors and parents buzz for entry, a copy of the same photograph from the store had been blown up double-size and taped to the inside of the glass, with a printed sign beneath that read MALLORY: IN OUR THOUGHTS, IN OUR HOPES, IN OUR PRAYERS.
As at the store, Sabine ran her fingertips over a surface that Mallory might once have touched, and as at the store, she picked up nothing.
But it was another step toward familiarizing herself with the girl’s world by locating her in its precincts.
The shape of a person was forming, but Sabine needed more than a bare outline if she was to have any chance of finding her, dead or alive.
Sabine feared the worst—the disappearance of teenage girls from good homes rarely boded well—but she resisted allowing fear to become an assumption, because that would cloud her perception and judgment.
Even the presupposition that the Norton home environment was good or safe was problematic, for who knew what went on behind closed doors?
If she could get inside the house, Sabine might be able to come up with an answer, even if it was only to rule out the involvement of one or both of the parents.
Abuse left a very distinct miasma, and sexual abuse a more specific one.
A person didn’t even have to be as unusual as Sabine to spot it.
She had known police who could pick up on it within moments of entering a residence, especially if parent and child were present; abused and abusers had a shared spoor.
So Sabine would have to go to the house, as she had always assumed she would. She could procrastinate no longer.
The Nortons lived on the northern outskirts of Bingham, on the road to Moscow.
It was a ranch-style home on about a half acre, but with no extensions to the original necessary to accommodate a growing family, since Mallory was the couple’s only child.
The front yard was planted with fall-blooming native trees—Franklin, Higan cherry, and witch hazel—while a single sugar maple stood at the eastern extreme, close to the road, a green ribbon tied to its trunk.
The doors to the two-car garage at the right of the house were open, but only one of the bays was occupied.
The vehicle inside was a Honda CR-V: more the choice of a wife than a husband, in Sabine’s view.
That was good, as she preferred dealing with women more than men.
It wasn’t that women were necessarily more open-minded, only that they didn’t feel the same need to pretend they weren’t.
She rang the doorbell and watched samaras pinwheel from the sugar maple, the crown of the tree bright with yellows, oranges, and reds, so that it might have been afire against the blue of the afternoon.
But to the west, the sky was turbulent with cloud, and there was rain on the air.
The door opened. Anita Norton stood in the gap; Sabine recognized her from the news reports.
She was in her late thirties, so she couldn’t have been more than twenty when Mallory was born, but looked older than her years.
Her daughter’s vanishing would have aged her, even in such a short space of time, though Sabine guessed that life might have been chipping away at her from before.
The Honda in the garage was eight or nine years old, and the house showed signs of patching and mending in the absence of funds to make more meaningful repairs.
The Nortons were managing to keep their heads above water, even as they felt it lapping against their chins.
Sabine wondered how many people had come to Anita Norton’s door over the last month, or called her on the phone.
A lot, she surmised, though it would have fallen off lately as the mystery of Mallory’s disappearance dragged on.
Anita would still have felt her heart skip and her stomach lurch every time the doorbell rang, but less so with the phone; if there was news, bad news, it would be communicated in person, and by someone in uniform.
She might have been relieved to see only a woman of late middle age standing on her doorstep, holding a wool hat in her hands, a tasseled suede bag over one shoulder; relieved, and disappointed.
“Can I help you?” Anita Norton asked.
“I might be able to help you,” Sabine replied. “I don’t promise that I can, but I’d like to try.”
She reached into the bag and produced copies of two newspaper articles, one from years before, the other more recent. Both related to the disappearances of children and, ultimately, the retrieval of bodies.
“I’m showing you these so you’ll know who I am,” she said, “not because I’m suggesting Mallory’s outcome might be the same.
My hope, like yours, is that your daughter is alive and may yet be found.
In the past, I’ve been able to offer assistance in that regard—not always, not even more often than not, but I’ve had some successes. ”
She passed the articles to Anita Norton, who didn’t read all the way through before handing them back.
“I’ve heard of you,” she said. “What do you want here?”
“To see your daughter’s room, if I may.”
“Why?”
“Because I have no proper sense of Mallory, not enough to be able to recognize her.”
Anita folded her arms: rarely a good sign, in Sabine’s experience.
“There are photographs,” said Anita. “Half the state knows what my daughter looks like.”
“I wasn’t speaking of her appearance,” said Sabine.
“I was talking about her essence. All that’s the best of her, all that she is, will be present in her room.
” The breeze carried one of the samaras onto the step, where it landed by Sabine’s right foot.
She picked it up and sent it spinning toward soil.
“But I understand if you’d prefer not to let me in.
I don’t make a habit of approaching people directly. They tend to come to me.”
Sabine noticed that Anita was shivering.
She was wearing a pink T-shirt over slim-cut jeans that might once have fit snugly but now had to be held up with a belt.
How much weight had Anita lost since the girl had gone missing?
More than she could afford. They didn’t eat, the mothers of missing children; didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, struggled to concentrate, neglected their other kids, if they were fortunate enough to have any.
It was different for the fathers, Sabine thought, neither easier nor harder, but dissimilar in the character of the suffering.
Sometimes she felt sorrier for the men because so many lacked the vocabulary to express their pain and make it comprehensible, even to themselves.
All grief consumed, but it might be that certain men welcomed the consumption more than women.
They cannibalized themselves into oblivion.
“You should go back inside,” said Sabine. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
She stepped down from the porch.
“Will you know?”
Sabine looked up.
“If she’s alive, I mean,” Anita continued. “Will you know? Will you be able to tell?”
“I might.”
The contrary held more true, Sabine being better attuned to the profundity of absence. This Anita Norton seemed to guess, because next she said: “And if she isn’t?”
“Again, I might.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll call her name,” said Sabine, “and see if she answers.”
It was that simple, and also that complex.
“And would you tell me if she did answer? Or if she didn’t, but you knew she was dead?”
“Only if I was sure.”
Sabine permitted herself the lie. When it came to what she did, certainty was a rare commodity, but even so, and should it turn out to be the case, it would not be for her to tell this woman that her child was gone.
It would be for the police, and only when, or if, a body was found.
For the present, it was too early even to conceive of such a conversation.
Anita opened the door wider.
“You can come inside,” she said, “but—”
Sabine waited.
“Even if you’re sure, don’t tell me my daughter is dead.”
She stepped aside to let Sabine enter.
“Do you have tea?” Sabine asked.
“All kinds.”
“Which do you prefer?”
“Fruit.”
“Then I’d like some fruit tea, please—if it’s not any trouble, and you’ll join me.”
Anita closed the door.
“I’ll show you to Mallory’s bedroom,” she said, “then I’ll make the tea.”
“No. Let’s sit in the kitchen and drink it together.”
“I thought you wanted to see the room.”
“In time,” said Sabine. “First, I’d like you to tell me about Mallory.”
Anita Norton closed her eyes. Softly, she began to cry.