Page 108 of The Instruments of Darkness

“I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but give me a minute.”

“I notice you’re not rushing to dismiss it,” said Macy.

“No.”

“But why would he do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Henry’s death wasn’t part of the deal. Stephen agrees to surrender his son to Mara Teller, for reasons yet to be established, but an accident occurs and the child is injured or killed. Now Stephen and Teller are yoked together: Teller has Henry’s blood on her hands, and Stephen can’t go to the police because he’s complicit in the crime, one with which his wife has been charged. The best solution for all involved, Colleen apart, is that she should be tried and found guilty. Case closed.”

“When I hear it from you,” said Macy, “it sounds almost plausible. But then, you do have that effect on me.”

“Before you go all dewy-eyed, I have one more complication to add.”

“Which is?”

Before continuing, I permitted her another mouthful of liquor. I thought she might need it.

“Sabine Drew,” I said.

4

he left you, he left you, and now you are ours.

Kathryn Nuernberger, “You Are Afraid of the Dark”

CHAPTER LXVIII

To the northwest, Sabine Drew lay awake. Through the open drapes of her window, she could see the outline of branches against the starlit sky, like fractures in the cosmos, and hear the flitting of bats on the hunt for night insects. She laid a hand against her breastbone and felt night sweat upon it. She made an effort to sit up, but her body would not respond, and when she tried to breathe, it was as though a hand had been placed over her nose and mouth. She began to panic, flailing against the bedclothes with her legs, even as her arms and torso remained rigid.

Suddenly she was no longer in her own bed, but lying in cold ground. There was dirt on her chest, dirt on her face, dirt in her eyes. The weight of it grew heavier and heavier, the light above slowly being obliterated until there was only darkness and the imminence of death. She was not alone. Henry Clark was nearby. She could hear him crying, could feel him straining toward a consciousness that was both hers and that of another, a man old but strong, still fighting even as the earth bound him to itself.

And a fourth was with them, a near-formless entity: hungry, alien, and yes, lonely. It still held Henry close, but it was also reaching for the man—a stranger, not the detective—reaching for her, because she was one with him in his final moments. She surrendered to its touch, intimate and searching, yet also uncertain. It tightened its grip, and curiosity turned to hostility.

Because it only likes children.

The pressure on her eased. She could move again.

The man was dead.

CHAPTER LXIX

Not unexpectedly, Macy wasn’t pleased to hear Sabine Drew’s name mentioned.

“That woman is a fraud,” she said. “I don’t even want to begin calculating the number of hours wasted on her wild-goose chase for a child who was already dead while we were searching woodland halfway across the state.”

“Is that what bothers you,” I said, “the wasted hours?”

“You know damn well it isn’t. Drew gave false hope to Edie Brook’s parents, all for her own self-aggrandizement, but she wasn’t the one who had to tell them that their daughter’s remains had been found in the Scarborough marshes, half-eaten by crabs. We had to do that.”

“Drew told me she tried to speak with the parents, but they didn’t want to see her.”

“Do you blame them?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Macy gave me the full force of her glare.

“I’m waiting for the ‘but,’?” she said.