Chapter 77
Sabine Drew had returned to Haynesville to feed her fish, do some laundry, and consider everything that had happened in The Plains—which included, distractingly but pleasantly, a couple of bouts of lovemaking with Tim Sadlier at the Bingham Motor Inn.
Sabine, who hadn’t had sex in so long that she feared she might have reattained virginhood, was surprised by just how joyful being with Tim made her feel.
She’d been alone for years—or not quite alone, given the imminence of the dead to her, but certainly deprived of close contact with the living—and it was only in embracing another person, physically and emotionally, and allowing herself to be embraced in turn, that she recognized just how isolated she’d become.
At one low point she’d even investigated becoming a nun, after learning that the number of Catholic nuns in America had dropped by eighty percent over the past fifty years, with the average age of those who remained also being eighty.
Sabine had been baptized Catholic but lapsed in her teens—coincidentally or otherwise, when her gift/curse, delete as appropriate, began manifesting in earnest, proof of an afterlife not necessarily corresponding to proof of the existence of God.
Nonetheless, she wagered the nuns needed her as much, if not more, than she might need them, and so wouldn’t be in a position to quibble over details.
What finally put Sabine off, apart from the prospect of having to rise before dawn to pray and chant, followed by solitary Bible study and reflection, was that she’d be required to spend the rest of her days contemplating the ultimate unattainable male.
This struck her as adding unnecessary fuel to the fire.
She had, therefore, been living with a low-level hum of depression for years.
When her seclusion was shattered by Tim Sadlier, and the hum fell away, she was able to appreciate the quietude, broken by the breathing of the man lying next to her in a motel bed.
Strange, she thought, that she should use the word lovemaking about sex with a man she barely knew.
Sabine disliked profanity and used it sparingly, but even allowing for her sensitivities, words other than the ‘f’ one were available to describe what she and Tim had enjoyed.
That she did not reach for them might have been dismissed as sentimentality, the impulse of a foolish woman falling head over heels in late middle age, a prelude to handing over the contents of her bank accounts before learning that her beloved had families in three states and a criminal record for fraud.
But Sabine was not foolish, and her abilities made her acutely sensitive to those around her.
She could pick up quickly on lies, evasions, hostility, but she was also attuned to their opposites: truth, openness, kindness.
Love. In Tim Sadlier, she perceived only decency, and a kind of idealism.
Life might have disappointed him, yet he was not a disappointed man and there was no bitterness to him.
He had shared with her his ambition to leave Spero and The Plains, and while he might not have been speaking of moving to Europe and becoming an artist, or venturing into the to work with threatened tribes—he didn’t even want to leave Somerset County, never mind the state—it was a big step for him.
It spoke of a man who was not prepared to give up hope, however modest it might be.
In like manner, Sabine had suspended, if not abandoned, her dream of companionship (stopping short of love, which was where hope entered the realm of fantasy), while isolating herself against regret should it prove elusive.
Life, it seemed, had surprised both Tim and Sabine, rapidly and unexpectedly binding each to the other.
But the incident in the woods had stayed with her, and she discussed it with Tim before returning home, she in his arms, her face against his chest, breathing in the strong man-smell of him, all sweat and earth and grass.
She shared a great deal about her past that night, because she wanted to be up-front with him from the off.
Were he to Google her name, he’d find out the truth anyway, at least about the children, the living and the dead.
That she was also a murderer who had killed a man by poisoning his wine was a morsel she’d keep for a deathbed confession.
Murder was a lot to take in on a second date, and represented the kind of overshare that might militate against a third, even if the man in question had deserved what he got.
(Sabine’s lack of doubt on that issue surprised even herself.)
“So you’re a medium?” Sadlier asked.
“I don’t call myself that,” Sabine replied brusquely. “I don’t even know what it means. Do you?”
Sadlier admitted that he didn’t, but it was the only word in his vocabulary that approximated to what she was telling him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend. I’m trying to understand.”
“Well, good luck with that. I’ve been trying to understand it all my life, and I can’t say I’m very far from where I started.”
“So when you came here to help with the search, it wasn’t just to pull on your hiking boots and walk a grid?”
“I hoped I might have more to offer,” said Sabine.
“Did you, um, pick up on something before you got here? Or see anything?”
“Like Mallory Norton’s ghost, soaked in blood, with a finger pointing into the far distance? ‘Yonder lies the man!’ ”
“Yes,” Sadlier replied seriously. “Yes, I guess so.”
“No, I didn’t see Mallory Norton. I’ve seen others, but not her.”
“Up here? You’ve seen others here, in the valley?”
They were coming to it now, coming to what she’d experienced out in those woods.
Sabine first told him of the woman on Big Island, she with the cleft skull, and Sadlier rubbed his chin, the thick bristles making a sound like logs hissing softly in a fire, which brought Sabine close to tears for reasons that could not be explained beyond the beautiful ordinariness of it; and she did not speak further, nor did she move, but remained motionless against him, for though she had more to say, so much more, it seemed to her that her future, their future, rested on how he might respond; that here was the moment where words weighing less than feathers and more than a soul would tip the balance, either for or against, and nothing said after could ever undo it.
“Well,” said Tim Sadlier, “isn’t that a thing?”
His voice and eyes were all wonder, like a child encountering magic for the first time, and accepting it without reservation as itself alone. He peered down at her from the heights of the pillow, and a calloused finger stroked her cheek.
“But what,” he said, “made you fall in the woods?”
So this, too, she revealed to him; and when she was done, he told her of coffee beans arranged on a kitchen table and scattered on a cold floor, and seed bags torn in a locked toolshed, and she knew she had found the right man.
Now, at home in Haynesville, she refilled a bag with fresh clothing to last a week, replenished her toiletries, and made a final check on her fish.
A neighbor, one of the few she trusted for the task, was looking in on the house while she was away, but the automatic feeders took care of the needs of the fish, and mercifully, none of them had died.
She both did and did not want to return to The Plains.
She wanted to because of Tim Sadlier, but she did not want to because of everything else: a drowned boy, a missing girl, but most of all, the storm of anger and suffering that had engulfed her during the search, fragments of the lost coursing through it like debris, their names and the names of others, with the place and manner of their dying, but so confused that the associations between them could not be made with certainty and all deaths became one, a babel of voices speaking in tongues known only to the extinct, intelligible to her solely as emotions, colors; a synesthesia of agony.
Scott Theriault’s voice was among them, but it was both him and not him: Scott, but not Scott entire.
The best of him was gone, and the storm had gathered up what remained to add to its strength.
But the heart of the storm was the Other that spoke an older language still, a creature—because its nature was not human—concealed in the tumult, inciting the dead to extremes, using their pain to feed its own and its intent to focus theirs.
It was both present and absent; Sabine was aware of entrapment, and an enforced limit to its range.
It resembled a prisoner whispering persuasions from his cell, making agents of disorganized others, so that what was once chaotic was channeled into purpose; or a wolf hunting with hounds, binding them with fear of the alpha, but also with the prospect of bringing down bigger prey through its leadership.
And the Other had a name, one it could not bury from Sabine, because as the storm passed through her, so too was she briefly of it.
The Other’s name was unfamiliar to her, but allied to it, like a twin star, was another name she knew very well.
She’d held off on acting on it only because she wanted to be sure her mind wasn’t playing tricks, conflating her memories with those of the Other.
Sabine called the private investigator. The call went straight to voicemail, so she left a message. She kept it simple.
“I’ve been to The Plains, Mr Parker,” she said. “Call me.”
She closed her bag and went to bed. The next day, she would return to the hunt.