Page 71 of The Instruments of Darkness

The casualties in the rear were all senior executives at DavMatt-Hunter Industries, a modestly sized but highly regarded oil and gas consultancy based in New Hampshire. It specialized in digital and advanced analytics in the area of ethylene cracker investment, particularly liquid feedstocks: naphtha, gas oil, and heavier feeds. Just hours earlier, the four men had flown into LaGuardia from a scouting mission in Louisiana, where a Taiwanese plastics group was preparing to move forward on a $9.4 billion ethylene cracker complex by the Mississippi River, another addition to Cancer Alley. The quartet had been due to spend the night in Hartford in advance of a strategy meeting with core investors the following morning, and news of the accident immediately threw DavMatt-Hunter into convulsions. Within minutes of the CEO being informed of what had happened, efforts were under way to reorganize the company, reposition staff, and—most important of all—reassure stakeholders. Emails were sent. Phones buzzed with messages and incoming calls.

One such call was made to a house in Dayton, Maine, the temporary home of Stephen Clark.

CHAPTER XLV

The crowd at the Bear was thinning out, and Dave Evans had gone home for the night. A woman was dancing close by her male partner in the center of the floor, swaying in time to music I did not recognize. The man tried to pull the woman closer, but she slipped from his grasp. She wasn’t dancing for him, only herself.

Sabine Drew had not asked me anything more about Jennifer, my dead daughter. Neither had I spoken to her of the others I had seen—Jennifer’s mother, or some semblance of her, among them. It was enough for Drew that I had revealed myself to her. The rest was inconsequential.

“I wonder why they still come to you” was all she said. “I expect you’ll find out, when the time is right.”

“I may have to die for that.”

“Then the revelation could be some way off, since you strike me as remarkably difficult to kill.”

“You make it sound like a character flaw.”

“I don’t doubt there are some people who might see it that way.”

“More than I’d prefer.”

“Although you have reduced their number somewhat over the years.”

“There you go again,” I said, “speaking your mind.”

“Consider it one of my character flaws.” She moved on. “He cries so much—Henry, I mean. I get annoyed at him sometimes, but it’s not his fault. He’s hardly more than a baby, and doesn’t understand what’s happening to him. He stops only when I sing. That helps to quiet him. I imagine his mother sang to him. You might ask her, should the opportunity arise. I don’t know many songs for children, and it feels inappropriate to lull him with murder ballads. If I knew what he liked to hear, I could add it to my repertoire.”

“And you’re convinced he’s in Gretton?”

“Or somewhere nearby,” she said. “I can’t be more specific. It’s like putting an ear too close to the speaker on a radio: the music turns to noise and becomes unidentifiable. But I haven’t ventured past the town line.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m frightened. He isn’t alone in there. There’s someone, or something, with him. I think it’s feeding on Henry, victualing on his pain and confusion. It’s taking its time with him.”

I tried to process what I was hearing.

“Are you talking about an animal?”

“No, not an animal, and not even a human being with an animal’s nature. I can’t tell you precisely what it is, because I’m not sure Henry knows. It’s completely black where he’s being kept. He can’t see, only feel, so he may be underground: buried, perhaps. That’s the reason it’s taken me so long to come forward, and why I chose to approach you and not the police. You see, I think this presence is familiar. I’ve encountered it before.”

“When?” I asked.

“When I failed to find Edie Brook.”

CHAPTER XLVI

Moxie Castin lived in Deering Center, in a grand old house that once belonged to his uncle. Precisely how it had come to be in Moxie’s possession remained unclear, since rumor had it that his uncle hated Moxie’s guts and would have burned the place to the ground rather than see his nephew happily situated in it, but the ways of lawyers are not like those of other men. The uncle died, and after a suitable period had elapsed, the house became Moxie’s.

Deering Center was formerly known simply as Deering, back in the 1800s when it was an independent entity. In the last year of that century, it was absorbed into Portland and the name was changed, but it still resembled a country town, aided by its proximity to the thirty acres and more of Baxter Woods, which Moxie’s home abutted. As he parked his car, one of his neighbors, Phil Ferry, was picking a couple of pieces of windblown trash from his lawn while his dog, a near-blind terrier named Artie, went for its nighttime pee in the bushes. Ferry was an old coot with long white hair, and sideburns that connected to a mustache above his bare chin, a style once popularized by the Union general Ambrose Burnside, hero of the Siege of Knoxville, but rarely glimpsed since his passing.

“Saw you on TV,” said Ferry.

“How did I look?”

“I got to say, you looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

“It’s what I was bred for.”